


Assistents Make Good Assistants

by shrinking_universe



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: F/F, Humor, M/M, Multi, Science, Snogging, assistent is so cute, case fic with original plot, everything is connected i swear, fun flirting, i have no idea what lieutenants even are, quite dialogue heavy, silly fun, this is half crack, welcome to the niche corner
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-03-27 21:25:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13889448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shrinking_universe/pseuds/shrinking_universe
Summary: Now that Dirk has his shiny new agency, he decides that they ought to have someone manning the front desk. A whim (and the universe) leads him to hiring Lieutenant Assistent for the job, and it ends up working surprisingly well.There’s also a case, some slime is involved, and everything is definitely connected.





	1. Here To Assist

**Author's Note:**

> HELLOOO  
> I know I can’t be the only one who loved Dirk & Assistent’s short interaction in the finale and wished for more. So I decided to pull this ship out of my ass basically.
> 
> This is set a couple of months after the bit where they were shown standing in the new agency. Because that short clip was super vague this is like 90% just my headcanons for the agency. Also I decided that Dirk, Todd and Farah are roomies and live in an apartment above the agency in Seattle. Oh and they totally know Mona is there (the show made it look like they don't know but nah they do).
> 
> Blackwing is mentioned in this a lot but otherwise this is a very Blackwing threat-less fic, because I honestly have no clue what they were planning on doing with Ken and Friedkin and stuff. So this is a pretty lighthearted one with a nice little mystery and cute shipping. Aaand I'm also ignoring that whole weird Todd/Farah thing that the show was implying. Also no Brotzly here either, sorry. (I do like that ship)
> 
> Well, enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER:  
> I don't own Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency or any of its contents, and I'm not making any money off this.

When Mona promptly turned into a motorcycle, Dirk didn’t have time for niceties. He had to get to The Boy, now, and he was done trying to explain things to the man currently freaking out next to him. So, he turned to Lieutenant Assistent, grabbed the security pass he’d been clutching in his hand and took it before he had time to protest.

”Sorry, but I really need this, ta-ra!” Dirk said, shoved the pass in his pocket and put on the helmet.

As they went speeding on along the corridor, Dirk spared a brief thought to Assistent, who’d been left staring after them in bewilderment. He hoped he hadn’t foiled the man’s escape out of the facility by nicking his pass. He seemed rather nice – for Blackwing – and wouldn’t want him to be severed in half by the knights.

 

* * *

 

  
The phone was ringing. Somehow the phone was _always_ ringing. Dirk had almost started conjuring up theories about it, when he realized the reason it felt like it was always ringing was probably because no one ever bothered to answer it, and so the noise went on.

”Todd, get the phone!” he yelled from his office, annoyed at having his important work interrupted like this.

He’d spent the past ten minutes lovingly rolling pizza slices into little wraps.

Well, solving a case might have been more important work, but they didn’t have any cases at the moment and therefore this was the second most important thing on the agenda. Come to think of it, maybe they didn’t have any cases because no one answered the bloody phone.

”Why do I have to do it?” Todd yelled back indignantly from somewhere in the lobby.

”You’re the assistant!” Dirk reminded him, in a how-could-you-not-understand-this tone.

Todd appeared in the doorway of his office – which wasn’t very big at all by the way, just a room with a desk and some clutter, but the fact that he had a room of his own in the agency made Dirk feel more important. Todd stood there for a second, looked like he was going to give him the finger, but then turned around and mercifully went to pick up the phone.

It turned out to be about a very short and easy, although interesting case which had involved a sentient record player and a dead mailman, and from then on Dirk decided that maybe Alexander Graham Bell wasn’t a total tool for inventing the telephone.

But someone needed to be there to answer it, and Todd had other things on his mind.

”I know you’ve dubbed me the role of an ’assistant’,” Todd started, when Farah was driving them back home after they’d finished up the case. ”And that’s fine, really, but I don’t want to be the guy who has to sit at a desk and be like a secretary or some shit.”

Dirk sighed. ”Then what do I even pay you for?”

”You _don’t_ pay us,” Farah and Todd said in unison.

”Oh, right,” he said. ”Farah? Do you feel like taking up front desk duties?”

”I mean, our filing system’s a disaster and my hands are itching to organize all the mess,” Farah said thoughtfully and very truthfully.

Everything in their life was a bit of a mess, which Farah had gotten used to but not entirely accepted yet. Especially when it came to them three living together in an apartment that was just big enough to house them, but also small enough for random clutter and chaos to slowly but steadily take over.

”But,” Farah continued, ”if I’m sitting at the desk, who’s going to be there to save your asses all the time?”

”Oh no, you’re right,” Dirk sighed again. ”And we can’t ask Mona, she’s too busy being a houseplant most of the time, which isn’t exactly the most efficient thing.”

He pushed his hands in his trouser pockets, as if to help him meditate on the issue. They were the same trousers he’d worn when they saved Wendimoor, the ones he’d gotten shot at in and hadn’t worn again until now. He hadn’t gotten the bullet hole mended, and the bloodstain was still visible on the fabric. He’d reasoned it was sensible to keep one ’get shot at in’ pair of trousers in his ensemble so he could wear them whenever he had a hunch they might run into trouble. That way, if he got shot at again, he wouldn’t ruin another pair of decent trousers.

Mercifully there had been no guns involved this time.

As he explored the pockets aimlessly, expecting to find nothing but the calming void that often inhabited pockets, an object found its way into his hand. He took it out of the pocket, surprised.

It was the security pass he’d taken from the poor Mr. Lieutenant Assistent. On the back of it was his contact information, including a phone number. He stared at the little row of numbers for a while.

Oh, okay, the universe was giving him an idea.

 

* * *

 

 

**_I believe I have something of urs._ **  
**_Meet me at the city square park (in seattle) in 3 days at 2pm next 2 the statue of the ugly angry guy riding a headless horse & I’ll give it back._ **

Dirk looked down at his phone, wondering if the text had maybe been too vague or threatening. Well, it was too late to do anything about it now, all he could do was wait. And hope that he hadn’t just made a massive mistake. What if he was a long way from Seattle? Would anyone in their right mind come to see him based on that text? And what if he’d brought Blackwing with him?

He felt himself sweat slightly under his jacket, both from nervousness but also because the spring had provided a rather warm day. He wondered if he should he have worn his ’get shot at in’ trousers today. And yet, when he’d carefully chosen his clothes for the day those trousers had been furthest from his mind. That should prove he’d be fine. Shouldn’t it?

He shifted his bum on the bench and looked at the clock again. It was still 2.10 PM, just like it had been when he last looked at it ten seconds ago. He looked around as subtly as he could. He could see the main entrance to the park quite clearly, but all the people entering that way were couples, children, wrong people.

He turned around on the bench, trying to see past the bush that was blocking some of his view of the other side of the park, when he spotted a pair of sunglasses peeking through the bush and startled violently.

”Ah!” he squeaked, and pointed at the shades.

There was a loud rustle in the bush, a muffled ’fuck’, and the sound of someone stumbling. Then, out of the bushes emerged one potentially assistant shaped Mr. Assistent, wearing black, discreet clothes and Ray-Bans and looking ready to bolt at any second.

”You came!” Dirk exclaimed happily, jumping up in excitement.

Assistent took a step back, hands going to his belt. Dirk looked at his belt, eyes wide, but then saw he hadn’t brought a gun. It had just been a reflex. He was relieved; he hadn’t brought a weapon either.

”Don’t worry, I’m harmless,” Dirk said, although he realized the effect of his words might have been stumped by his almost maniacal grin. He let the grin fall off his face and tried to go for a more serious, calm look, but judging by Assistent’s tense pose it wasn’t working miracles.

”Man, I should have known it would be you,” Assistent said, shaking his head. He sounded slightly defeated, and his voice had a very different tone compared to the high, panicked one Dirk had heard when the knights had attacked.

”Yes, me,” Dirk said, doing a little jazz hands movement. ”How long did you stand there for?”

”I don’t know, fifteen minutes?” Assistent said, sounding irritated now. ”You were late.”

”By, like, four minutes,” Dirk shrugged. ”Would you have stood there all day if I hadn’t noticed you?”

Assistent didn’t answer. He was looking around furtively.

”I didn’t bring anyone with me, if that’s what you’re worrying about,” Dirk said. He sat back down on the bench to establish a more casual air.

Then, once again remembering that this man had literally been part of Blackwing, he hesitated.

”Did… you?” he asked.

Suddenly it occurred to him that this idea was probably very stupid.

”No,” Assistent said in an offended tone. He removed his shades, put them in his pocket and sat down on the far end of the bench gingerly. Then he sighed. ”I have nothing to do with Blackwing anymore.”

”Oh, well, that’s good to hear,” Dirk said, relieved. ”I mean, sorry for the loss of your job, I guess, except I’m not actually sorry, so, yeah.”

”No, that job _sucked_.”

”Well, you probably don’t need this, then,” Dirk said and handed him the security pass. He’d never really expected him to need it in the first place.

Assistent glanced at him quickly. Now that his eyes were visible and they were meeting in a normal place in daylight, Dirk could take a better look at his face than he had during their rushed meeting at Blackwing. He could tell that Assistent looked like someone who might be a nice person. He looked small and harmless. Well, mostly. Dirk had learned to never judge books by their covers. Unless they were good covers with nice, colourful illustrations. But that had nothing to do with Assistent.

He took the pass from Dirk, looked down at it, and then let out a short disdainful breath through his nose.

”No, I don’t need it,” he said, then shoved it deep down his pocket. He looked back up again, but avoided looking at Dirk by observing the steady stream of people who were still entering the park every now and then.

”Is your name _really_ Assistent?” Dirk asked, for his part observing Assistent.

”Yes,” he replied, in the deadpan voice that insinuated he’d had this conversation many times before.

”Is your first name Personal? Or, or, Sales?” Dirk joked.

”Fuck you, your name’s Gently, how’s that any better?” he snapped back and turned his eyes back to Dirk’s, looking annoyed. ”Oh, no, wait, I guess it’s not as stupid as Cjelli.”

Dirk looked down at his lap with a pout. Not cool. He tried not to let that comment get to him, but he couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about the fact that this man had very probably gone through his ’project Icarus’ file. It felt like he had the upper hand. Most people had the upper hand on Dirk. It wasn’t exactly hard to achieve. But still, it stung a little. It also made him feel even more determined to hire and get to know Assistent, so maybe some day he’d have collected enough information about Assistent to surpass whatever he knew about him from his file and HA! Then he’d totally be the winner of their nonexistent competition.

”I’m sorry,” Assistent said when Dirk didn’t reply. He did sound awkward, so maybe it was sincere.

”I’m sorry too,” Dirk shrugged. ”For leaving you to fend for yourself back there. With the knights.”

It was Assistent’s turn to shrug. ”They were mostly after you, so I got away okay.”

When a silence settled between them again, Dirk decided to take his chance before Assistent would go for the ’okay, this was weird, thanks for my pass, let’s never see each other again’ line.

”Are you unemployed?” he asked, snapping his head to stare at Assistent, who flinched at his intensity.

”Excuse me?” he spluttered.

”C’mon, _are_ you?” Dirk pressed on.

”Yeah? Okay, yeah I am, thanks for asking, it’s been _just awesome_ ,” he said, and there was that familiar funny voice of his starting to make a return. It took all of Dirk’s willpower not to imitate him. He sounded like a bloody cartoon character.

”How would you like to be…,” Dirk said slowly, then used his fingers to make a drumroll on the bench that even Amanda would probably be proud of, ”an assistant?”

”Is this a joke?” Assistent asked, standing up.

Dirk stood up as well, ready to run after him if he bolted.

”I have a detective agency, now. A Holistic Detective Agency,” he made a wave with his hand to indicate the shiny new plaque of his that was proudly hanging on the agency’s wall. ”Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The best agency ever.”

”Get to the point, please,” Assistent said impatiently.

”We need someone to be our…,” Dirk started, then tried to think of a word that didn’t sound unappealing. Desk boy? Lobby boy? Secretary? Manservant?

”Our phone answering, stationery boy!” he announced happily, although he still grimaced at his final choice of words.

Assistent stared at him blankly.

”Okay, so, technically I already have an assistant but Todd’s always like ’Diiirk I’m so lazy and incapable of picking up the phone and-’ no, actually, Todd isn’t lazy, I take that back, he’s brilliant. But he doesn’t have the patience to man the desk and honestly I wouldn’t even want him to because I need him on our adventures, once he totally saved us from being crushed in a death labyrinth, and Farah, - Farah’s cool – also can’t take that job so we need someone else and the universe was telling me to pick you and you already know how weird things can get so you’d fit right in, what do you say?” he said, and then took a deep, much needed and loud breath.

”No!” Assistent shouted. ”You think I want to hang out with you, a bunch of freaks, after I saw your friend turn into a cannon and a motorcycle within two minutes?”

”Oh come on admit it, that was awesome and besides, you might get to meet aliens,” Dirk said coaxingly.

”Dammit, don’t try to rope me in with aliens, I should never have told you that,” he said.

”Pleeeease?” Dirk said. ”You’d get to see all sorts of cool things but you’d have a much calmer job than working for a bunch of sadistic, government meanies.”

”Wh-,” Assistent was lost for words for a second. ” _Why_ don’t you just pick someone else?”

” _Why_ -,” Dirk copied his worked up tone, ”not pick you?”

Assistent crossed his arms.

”How much would you even pay me?” he asked, frowning.

”Uh…,” Dirk started, and scratched his neck. ”Here’s the thing-”

”Oh my God,” Assistent interrupted him incredulously, and started walking away briskly.

Dirk’s feet were stuck for a second, and then scrambled after him, albeit a bit awkwardly since he still had a slight limp from his leg wound.

”Shit. Wait! You don’t have to decide now, I’ll show you around first! Let me show you our shiny new office! It’s so cool!”

 

* * *

 

**roughly a week later**

 

Dirk tried not to gloat. But he did anyway. A smug smile wormed into his face every time he glanced at Assistent behind the front desk.

Todd and Farah had gone to Bergsberg for a week to see Tina and Sherlock. He wished he could have gone with them, but they’d agreed that someone should stay behind to ’mind the shop’, even if they weren’t working on a case at the moment. Farah had bravely volunteered, but Dirk could see she really wanted to go to Bergsberg, and since he was secretly rooting for her and Tina’s budding romance – of which neither of them seemed to be aware of – he refused her offer so she could go see her.

Besides, Todd and Farah being away provided good time to slowly introduce Assistent to his future work place. Assistent had dropped by for three days in a row just to chat – it turned out that he did actually live in Seattle, quite close by in fact. He’d been quite twitchy and suspicious at first, like he was expecting something completely bonkers or deadly to manifest into the agency and traumatize him, but when nothing happened and he seemed to get over his initial image of Dirk and his strange world, he calmed down considerably and let his curiosity lead him.

At some point in their conversations he’d ended up sitting at the front desk because the nice swivel chair was conveniently there, and while he was sitting there he ended up answering the phone as well when it rang – it only made sense, since the phone was directly in front of him – and by Friday he’d started organizing their paperwork in a way that was both completely accidental and somehow natural.

Apparently he had a thing for files, which was good because Dirk and Todd hadn’t bothered to even think about keeping proper track of their cases (which infuriated Farah). Maybe it was his military background – they read a lot of files in the military, didn’t they? Dirk had heard Assistent muttering something about how ’Friedkin didn’t even know how to read files, stupid idiot’, so maybe he was also deriving some sort of savage pleasure from being in charge of a filing system, as if it was to spite Friedkin somehow, although Dirk didn’t know how. Friedkin wasn’t even there, none of them knew where he was.

Or maybe Assistent was just very precise. He looked like a person who was meticulous about almost everything in a polite, obedient way, while also looking slightly bewildered most of the time, like he couldn’t believe what life was throwing his way and what the people in it were saying to him. Dirk could relate to some of that. He never quite fully knew what was going on, either. But he’d always been good at not understanding things, so it didn’t faze him.

In any case, the files Assistent was working on started to come along very nicely.

As a big part of creating extensive case files was to recount the exact details of each case on paper, Dirk ended up telling Assitent everything about their adventures. Assistent would type away furiously on the computer while Dirk talked, intent on capturing and organizing their stories, even if it stretched late into the weekend and was therefore technically outside his working hours.

It was delightful, since it gave Dirk an opportunity to boast about how geniusly he’d cracked each case, and relive some of their wildest adventures through dramatic reenacting. It all seemed to interest Assistent so much that Dirk began to suspect that maybe the man, despite his slightly jittery nature, _did_ like some wild excitement in his life now and then. Clearly Blackwing had been a mistake and had given him a bad impression; that place sucked out the soul of everything that was wondrously weird in the world and spat it back empty.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t all Blackwing’s fault – even Dirk could see how creepy and weird the circumstances were during his and Assistent’s first actual meeting. He’d shouted in his face while they were chased by an army out of a child’s drawing. And then there’d been the whole thing with Mona.

At some point Dirk had realized he should probably mention the fact that Mona was in the room with them in the shape of a plant. It’d be polite. And even if Assistent hadn’t had intimidating memories of Mona, Dirk was pretty sure that he’d still want to know that one of the plants in the room was sentient.

When he’d told him, Assistent had backed away to the door, stared at the innocent looking ficus tree in question for about a full minute, and then left without a word.

But he had come back hesitantly the next day anyway. He’d sneak suspicious glances at the plant now and then, even though Dirk told him there was nothing to fear. When Mona remained as the ficus tree, Assistent eventually relaxed, although he absolutely refused to water the plant.

 

  
”I think I get it now. How it works,” Assistent said, a day before Todd and Farah were due back. Dirk had been explaining a chain of events that had occurred in a case, pacing back and forth next to the front desk.

”How what works?” Dirk repeated, stopping his pacing and cocking his head forward like a confused chicken.

”Your thing. Your, your power. When you uh- shouted at the glass in Blackwing, you said you weren’t a machine, that it wasn’t how it worked. So I think I get it now, the universe thing, how it all happens I guess,” Assistent said, the speed of his speech quickening at the end. He avoided looking Dirk in the eye.

”You mean… you were there?” Dirk said slowly, remembering his desperate outburst at Blackwing. ”On the other side of the glass?”

”Yeah. My job was to observe the… subjects… the- well, you. And keep track of things. Inform Friedkin of what was going on, stuff like that,” he replied. A blush was rising up his neck.

”So you ’observed’ me all of those times when I was put through those stupid tests for sixty-something days?” Dirk asked indignantly. He’d hated that feeling, of being squashed under someone’s microscope, and he hadn’t known that Assistent had been one of the eyes peering into the lens, although he probably should have.

”Well, they hired me a bit after your capture, so it was more like fifty-something days,” Assistent said, shrugging and looking at the floor.

”And how did that feel? Did you write interesting notes? Did I make a very boring zoo animal?” Dirk asked, knowing he was behaving in a waspish way, but feeling like it was his right. He leaned his hands on the desk so that he was slightly looming over Assistent.

”I’m sorry,” Assistent said, quickly looking up and then down again. ”I didn’t understand you. They tried to make you seem like something chaotic that needed to be… contained? I didn’t like the job, it was fucked up, but I didn’t know what to do.”

Dirk’s shoulders slumped, and he relaxed his pose against the desk. He’d always hate Blackwing, the whole operation, but it was no good blaming a guy like Assistent who’d thought he’d be joining some cool X-Files type of job. It’s not like he could have broken Dirk out all by himself. And this was the second time he’d apologized for working for Blackwing, when he hadn’t even asked for this job and didn’t owe Dirk anything. Or did he? Dirk didn’t even know himself.

Sometimes it was hard to settle scores in his complicated life, when nothing made sense and good people turned into evil witches, and goons like Friedkin saved him from being shot by Bart’s old friend. What was up with that Ken, anyway?

”It wasn’t your fault,” Dirk sighed, moving his head in quick, tiny shakes to arrange his thoughts.

”I did feel sorry for you, you seemed nice,” Assistent said. ”Even if I was a tiny bit scared of you.”

”Really?” Dirk asked. There was no reason to feel proud for being thought of as scary, it wasn’t his intention in life at all, but a small part of him was pleased anyway. He’d been so vulnerable during those sixty-something days, that it was good to know he hadn’t seemed completely weak.

”Yeah,” Assistent admitted and gave an uncertain little smile.

They were silent for a few seconds, and then it seemed Assistent wanted to move on from their Blackwing talk – it occurred to Dirk that maybe they’d gotten a bit too personal for Assistent’s liking, Dirk wasn’t sure, he didn’t have almost any boundaries himself when it came to talking to people – because Assistent turned his attention briskly to the computer again and straightened his posture.

”Can you get back to talking about that case, maybe skip the theatrics so we can get this done?” he asked, and then glanced back at Dirk, as if to see if he’d crossed a line by being too mean or something, but Dirk only grinned and nodded in return.

It had felt nice to see Assistent smile, even if it had been a tad awkward. It made Dirk feel like they were already moving on from that ’shrieking at each other in a life-threatening situation inside a military establishment’ type of acquaintance to a possible beginning of some sort of friendship.

He remembered how Todd hadn't wanted anything to do with him when they met for the first time, and now they were the best of friends. Yeah, it’d be fine.

When he got to the end of the case, Assistent finished typing and stretched his fingers with a poorly hidden yawn. He was now completely up to date with their cases which felt significant, almost like there was cause for celebration. But since neither of them knew what to say or do, Dirk settled for a hearty, half-yelled ”yay!”, to which he received a nod from Assistent.

”Good night then,” Assistent said curtly, when Dirk had walked him to the door and they hovered there.

”You’ll come tomorrow too, won’t you?” Dirk asked eagerly yet rather desperately.

Despite hanging out for almost an entire week they hadn’t really discussed the job details like they probably should have if Dirk was a proper employer. But, it wasn’t a real job, was it? And surely Assistent knew nothing involving Dirk and his job was normal.

The only responsible thing Dirk had thought of discussing was the issue of money – mainly because Assistent had mentioned it. He didn’t have any regular wages to offer. They’d had a couple of clients by now and they’d paid them something, or sometimes they’d just bump into money when the universe allowed it. It was mainly managed by Todd and Farah, to pay their rent. Not that they were in any great trouble yet, what with the amount of money Lydia Spring gave Farah, although a great chunk of it had been used to attain the agency’s business space.

Apparently Assistent had earned rather hefty wages when he worked for Blackwing, too, and could survive off on his saves for now, so they'd reached an unofficial agreement that if they somehow ever got hired by a generous millionaire or something to solve a case, Dirk would give Assistent his share for sure. It wasn’t the best of agreements and probably violated about a hundred different employer-employee codes, but that’s just how it was.

At the door the gentle yet cool night wind was sweeping in, and Assistent hesitated on the threshold, but only for a little while.

”Yeah, I guess… I don’t even know why, but sure,” he replied.

Dirk beamed.

”Brilliant,” he said, clapping his hands together. ”I’ll try my best to attract some aliens for you.”

Assistent rolled his eyes. ”Whatever, man,” he said dryly, but Dirk thought he looked sort of hopeful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think of it!!!! Any kind of comments are welcome. Writing Assistent is super hard because he's such a minor character but... I like him so much that I just needed to try.
> 
> little announcement: even though Assistent now has a half-fanon name Michael (I mean the actor Confirmed it but it was never said in the show) which will also be his name in this, I'll still refer to him as Assistent in the narration and they're mostly going to call him that because when I started writing this he didn't have a first name at all and somehow it feels more natural to me to refer to him by his last name :-D


	2. Nothing But Ice Cream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUYS HOOOLY FUCK I _still_ can't believe max landis mentioned dirk/assistent romance in his instagram post like what the hell. I posted the first chapter of my fic and like 5 days (?) later he Does That??
> 
> Am I a holistic shipper????
> 
> anyway here's chapter two! enjoy!

Dirk was sitting in his office the next day, playing Candy Crush and giving Assistent some space, when he heard chatter from the little hall outside their agency. He recognized the voices as Todd and Farah’s, and, like some loyal lapdog, got up and ran to meet them at the door with bouncy footsteps.

He hugged them both at the same time before they could protest; Todd’s face got squished somewhere in Dirk’s shoulder, but Farah’s head escaped unscathed.

”Who’s that?” she asked sharply at once, peering over Dirk into the room.

”Oh, right,” Dirk said, and stepped aside so they could both see.

Assistent’s head had perked up from the desk at some point. He looked startled now that he was under scrutiny, and he opened his mouth to say something, but Dirk beat him to it.

”Our new assistant!” he announced.

”But _I’m_ your assistant?” Todd said uncertainly, looking a bit pissed off, but also like he wasn’t sure if he should be. It was a very common expression when it came to Todd. ”Or, assist-friend, whatever?”

Farah was frowning and eyeing Assistent, who still had his mouth open like he was a confused little fish stranded on a beach, and under Farah’s hard eye he squeaked:

”Hey, you were the ones wanted by the FBI!”

While Dirk, who currently had most of his attention on Todd, replied at the same time:

”Yes, but he’s our assis-TENT. Who’s also an assistant.”

”You’re from Blackwing?!” Farah exclaimed.

”I told you about Farah and Todd,” Dirk said after having registered what Assistent had said.

”You did, but I didn’t put it together with the FBI thing until now-” Assistent started, but Todd interrupted.

”Wait what?” he asked, also staring at Assistent.

”Obviously he is, they’re the reason we were wanted and he’s probably seen our faces at work so many times that he remembers them,” Farah said to Todd, and then looked at Dirk like she couldn’t fathom him. ”Isn’t he, Dirk?”

”Okay, here’s the thing-,” Dirk said, but Todd was quicker again.

”Oh yeah, he’s totally Blackwing. Look, he has a sinister suit and he’s wearing all black,” Todd said, pointing at Assistent, who looked down at his clothes.

”How’s this sinister? It’s just a normal suit! And dammit, I like wearing black, okay?” Assistent said heatedly and again rather squeakily, but became quite meek and closed his mouth when Farah directed a stern look at him.

”AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!” Dirk yelled, because this was going badly.

They all turned to stare at him. A heavy silence settled.

”Thank you,” Dirk said. ”Chill out, you guys.”

Todd and Farah looked at him like he’d grown an extra limb.

”Basically he’s not evil,” Dirk said, trying to come up with a quick explanation before either of them freaked out. He spread out his hands as if to demonstrate the matter more clearly. ”Blackwing: yes. Now? No. Assistant!”

Assistent let out a loud sigh and rolled his eyes.

”Your friend here decided to hire me because you didn’t have a secretary or something and now I’m here because of some freakish turn of events that the universe designed, apparently,” he explained uncertainly to Todd and Farah.

”Yes, that,” Dirk nodded vigorously. That sounded much better.

”Right…,” Todd said slowly.

”I believe I should introduce you properly!” Dirk said excitedly. ”Guys, this is Assis _tent_. Yes, he’s actually called that.”

Assistent shot him an annoyed look.

”I met him when I returned The Boy. He’s like a lieutenant or something,” Dirk continued, then gestured to Farah. ”Assistent, this is Farah. She’s our bodyguard. Part-time sheriff, full-time badass.”

Farah nodded, and even though she was trying to look all Serious and Upset, Dirk could see her suppressing a smile at his compliment.

”And,” Dirk said, now pointing to Todd. ”That’s Todd. A cool guy.”

”Wow… thanks,” Todd said tepidly.

”But a Blackwing associate? I don’t know, Dirk…,” Farah said uncertainly.

”I’m not a spy, if that’s what you think,” Assistent said with a shrug.

Dirk turned to him.

”Don’t say that, that’s what a spy would say,” he said. Then he looked back at Farah. ”He’s not a spy, though.”

”Hmm,” Farah didn’t look completely convinced. She was still looking at Assistent. ”I’ll keep my eye on you.”

Assistent gulped. ”Okay.”

Dirk shot Farah a look, trying to go for a strict one that said ’don’t scare him off just when I’ve managed to make him stay’, but Farah looked away stubbornly.

The rest of the day was enveloped in an awkward atmosphere, where Dirk tried to get everyone to calm down and come to terms with the situation, but it didn’t really work because Dirk had never really been a good, patient diplomat. Todd and Farah stayed in the lobby all afternoon, which Dirk thought was a sign of them growing more comfortable with Assistent’s presence and therefore deemed it a success, until he realized they were sort of there to see that Assistent wouldn’t suddenly pull a gun on them or kidnap them or something.

It was quite tense, everyone refusing to leave and trying to pretend like they weren’t all self-conscious about everything. Farah and Todd would ask Dirk questions that circled around the themes of Was he sure about this? Would this work out? while Assistent shuffled some papers around on his desk, trying to pretend that they weren’t talking about him, and Dirk not even knowing how to answer about half of their questions.

He didn’t know almost anything, really, except that he wanted it all to work out. It felt odd to defend someone he had only known for about a week, but he already had a good feeling about this whole arrangement.

When the clock finally struck about four PM-ish, a time when Assistent usually left if there wasn’t anything going on, Dirk sighed audibly from relief. There hadn’t been any important phone calls all day or anything to distract them from the eeriely awkward vibes, but maybe now that Assistent was going home they could all try to get over the day.

Assistent shrugged on his jacket and collected his things, which Todd and Farah noticed as a sign of leaving, which in turn made them jump up.

”We’re gonna get some take-out,” Todd said to Dirk, almost running to the door with Farah. It definitely looked like those two had wanted to talk in private about Dirk’s unconventional choice for a secretary/assistant all day, but hadn’t been able to because they’d decided to behave like watchdogs.

Farah nodded to what Todd had said.

”Movie later?” she added cheerfully. It sounded a tiny bit forced, but Dirk smiled at them in agreement.

Before Assistent had had time to even properly leave his chair and head for the door, Todd and Farah were already gone. The door banged slightly, after which it was so silent that it almost felt like Todd and Farah hadn’t even been there that day. That is, if it wasn’t for that awkward air which they left behind.

Assistent sat slowly back down on his chair, looking confused. He didn’t take his jacket off again.

”Farah and Todd are a bit on edge with you. Mainly Farah. But Todd, too,” Dirk thought it best to explain. ”They know Blackwing was the last place I ever wanted to end up in, so. They’re probably afraid you’ll snatch me away again.”

”I get it,” Assistent said pensively. ”They’re obviously worried about you.”

Dirk nodded. Sometimes it still amazed him that he had actual friends who worried about him. It made him so very happy, but he didn’t always know how to deal with it, how to act like a normal friend and… acknowledge everything that Farah and Todd had done for him.

”Did you talk to them about your time in Blackwing?” Assistent asked, clicking absently on a ballpoint pen while he talked.

”Not in detail?” Dirk shrugged. ”It’s not a particularly nice subject… and it was uneventful.”

”Yeah but the whole thing was pretty messed up, so if I’d been through what you have I wouldn’t want it to be like, bottled up?” Assistent said, still focused on the pen.

It seemed that the subject of Blackwing was a bit sore for Assistent as well, judging by the way he would nervously look elsewhere when it came up. Maybe it had to do with guilt. In Dirk’s case, deep down he knew that he was slightly afraid of talking about the subject to Farah and Todd.

A part of him was worried that they wouldn’t want to hear about it, that they’d be put off if he talked about personal, serious stuff. It was probably because most of the relationships in his life had never really reached the friend status, and you wouldn’t open up about your anxieties to mere acquaintances without ruining whatever it was that you had.

But maybe he _did_ need to talk about it. Maybe they both did, to kick the elephant out of the room and their lives.

”You know all about it, though,” Dirk said after he realized he’d fallen silent.

”Not really,” Assistent said. ”I did see what you went through but I didn’t know how you felt about it, you know?”

Dirk nodded thoughtfully, then shrugged again, and decided that as a warm up to opening up to Farah and Todd he could share _something_ with Assistent, and then started talking about how lonely and frustrating it had been at Blackwing. He talked about holisticness again, how it was what drove him in life but how it sometime also proved a nuisance because it basically made him an anomaly and an easy target.

He kept it short, though. He didn’t want to keep Assistent confined to his desk all day.

”You should talk to your friends too,” Assistent said when he got up again to leave. ”Maybe they’re so defensive because they don’t know how to help you and they sort of see me as the only concrete threat they can deal with?”

Dirk was taken aback by the sheer wisdom of his statement. ”Wow, you’re like, actually smart.”

Assistent shrugged a little self-deprecatingly, like it was no big deal. ”Well, I did get hired by the CIA.”

”That doesn’t prove anything,” Dirk said with a laugh. ”Let’s not forget Friedkin.”

”Ugh. True.”

They then agreed it would perhaps be best if Assistent took the next day off, just so Dirk would have time to have a proper chat with his friends and convince them that he was okay now and have them get used to that fact.

He decided to just go for it before he got cold feet and sort of ambushed Farah and Todd when they returned from their take-out quest. It wasn’t easy. Dirk liked to talk a lot and could do so for ages, but when it came to gloomy personal stuff it took an effort.

They settled down with their food at home, Farah and Todd listening patiently while Dirk told them what Assistent already knew and going even deeper in than that, talking about the big chunk of his adolescence that he’d lost to Blackwing and how it’d made him feel even more isolated from others, and how much it had sucked to have to go back there again after all that. How he’d feared for Farah, Todd and Amanda, not knowing whether they were taken too and if they could ever reach him again. Being buried in those awful daily tests and feeling like he was punished for finally having some real friends in his life.

He may have shed a tear into his noodles. It was good take-out, though, so he wiped at his eyes quickly so the noodles wouldn’t get soggy. He’d thought that the food would get stuck in his throat because of choked up emotions, but he felt so good after talking that he wolfed down his food like he hadn’t eaten for days.

In turn Farah told him again of their desperate search for him while being on the run for two months – punctuated by nods and ’yeah’s from Todd – and their feelings of helplessness when they didn’t know how Dirk was doing.

They were all awful at this, by the way. Dirk was invested in his noodles after he was done with his bit, Todd kept repeating whatever Farah said and nodding so much he looked like a yoyo, and the way Farah stopped and started over her sentences made her sound like a broken tape recorder. But they all went through with it, and when they were done and picked a movie to watch there was a mutual feeling of enormous relief, not because the emotional moment was over but because they really _had_ bottled things up and it felt good to understand the struggles each of them had gone through, and to understand that they were now safe.

That night was the first night after Blackwing when Dirk didn’t have nightmares about waking up alone in Blackwing again.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When a few days passed and Farah hadn’t thrown Assistent into the streets by the scruff of his neck yet, and in his turn Assistent hadn’t done anything to signify he was being a spy or otherwise evil, Todd and Farah got rather used to his presence. Farah seemed to still be a bit suspicious, but that was because she was Farah and she was careful about everything, so Dirk didn’t take it as a bad sign.

And when a new case didn’t seem to make itself known – most of the calls that Assistent picked up were telemarketers, who unfortunately didn’t need any help solving anything – Dirk, Todd and Farah were all technically unemployed, and having nothing to do, they just milled around and kept each other company. Since their apartment wasn’t that grand or interesting, they often spent time in the agency’s roomy lobby. It was nice in there; the big windows let in a lot of sunlight and they had a telly in there as well. This, in turn, made them hang around Assistent and get hesitantly acquainted with him since he was there as well.

Eventually Todd and Farah seemed to come to the conclusion that if Dirk liked having Assistent around and if he wasn’t going anywhere, they might as well at least try to like him too. It was a good conclusion, Dirk thought. And he did like having Assistent around. He was funny and pretty sarcastic, which made a good fit to their agency because basically all of them were, but he was also smart and quite proper, and it was all wrapped up in that charming baffled state of his.

And if Dirk believed that Farah had felt some uneasiness at Assistent handling their files and knowing practically everything about their cases, one day her stern demeanor towards the matter softened a little.

”Wait, are those… colour coded?” she’d asked, when she’d been subtly hovering near Assistent’s desk while he arranged their files.

”What?” Assistent jumped, knowing full well that Farah had been observing him but still getting startled by her.

”The… files. Can I see?” Farah asked, pointing to a folder that had thin, colourful sticky notes attached to the pages within.

”Oh, okay,” Assistent said nervously, adjusting his jumper’s sleeves twitchily.

Dirk noticed that after Todd had pointed out Assistent’s ’sinister’ suit on their first meeting, he’d started trying to wear clothes that looked more harmless and casual every now and then. The jumper was still a dark grey, though, and he wore his black jacket over it. Dirk found the sight of him trying to blend in to a much more casual workplace slightly endearing, although he made a mental note to tell Assistent he was allowed to wear whatever he wanted.

Farah picked up the folder and flipped through it.

”Oh, did you, assign different colours to locations, clues, people? And have you cross-referenced things with these sticky notes?” Farah asked in a coolly casual way, even though Dirk could clearly tell that she was very interested.

”Yeah,” Assistent said, eyeing Farah while she flipped through the pages. Then he handed her another file when she appeared to be done inspecting it.

”I see you’ve used highlighters too,” Farah said, nodding. ”That’s uh. That’s pretty cool.”

Assistent nodded as well, rather quickly, and the two of them shared a moment where for some minutes Assistent handed files wordlessly to Farah while she looked at them carefully, visibly impressed.

”There’s a shop near here… they have a pretty good stationery compartment, did you know?” Farah asked him at the end of their strange yet solidary interaction.

”No, I don’t think I do,” he replied.

”Well. Maybe, I could show it to you some time,” Farah said, with a poor attempt at a detached tone.

She shrugged, and they both nodded at each other.

Dirk looked away with a smile.

 

* * *

 

 

”Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, good afternoon.”

This, Dirk decided, was one of the reasons it was so awesome he’d hired someone to answer their phone. It sounded so thrilling and _cool_ when someone that wasn’t him, Farah or Todd answered the phone with those words. It made the agency feel more real and impressive, especially with the official, businesslike aura Assistent had when he was on the phone.

He was twiddling around with paperclips this time in his office, leaning backwards on his chair, when the replies Assistent was giving to the person on the other end of the phone caught his attention. He didn’t sound like he was politely refusing to buy a monthly subscription of a house decor magazine.

”Oh, that’s unfortunate. And when did this happen?”

Dirk got up and rushed into the lobby, almost slipping over in his haste. His shoes squeaked on the floor as he grabbed the front desk for support. Assistent looked up.

”Is it a case?” Dirk mouthed.

Assistent nodded with a small smile, while he listened to what was said to him on the phone. He was scribbling something down on a notepad.

Dirk punched his fist in the air. Todd, who had been watching the news in a jaded manner on the lobby’s sofa looked up as well.

”Uh-huh. Where is it that you live?” Assistent asked.

Dirk tried not to get too interested in case it was something disappointing. He perched on Assistent’s desk while he waited. Some instinct that was present in both cats and humans decreed that sitting on desks was satisfying, and this instinct was especially strong in Dirk. And he noticed that Assistent’s desk had an optimal space for depositing your bum on.

Finally, after a couple of minutes that had felt a lot longer Assistent ended the call with polite goodbyes.

”A woman called. She said her neighbor acted really weirdly a couple of days ago and then he disappeared, and the police don’t seem to be too worried about it. But she said there was definitely something odd going on about him,” Assistent said.

”Yes!” Dirk shouted, getting up in his excitement and once again waving his arms about.

”Dirk,” Todd said simply.

”Right, I mean, that’s bad. He could be hurt, or dead. But it could be interesting too, couldn’t it? Something odd going on? That’s up our alley,” Dirk said cheerily.

”Yup,” Todd grunted, getting up from the sofa. ”I’ll go get Farah.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On Tuesday evening, at approximately 7.30 PM, a man named David Derosa drove off in his car and disappeared.

He was last seen by his neighbor Rachel, who wasn’t close enough to him to be friends exactly, but who knew his daily routines and his character rather well. According to her, he’d always return home from work around 4.10 PM, perhaps exchange some words with Rachel if she was outside, and then did pretty much nothing and went back to work the next day at 8 AM. On Saturdays he went to town on his own. He kept to himself and had no visitors, but behaved in a jolly, polite way if he happened to bump into you.

Which is what had Rachel so worried. She’d went outside to take the trash out, when David had exited his house, leaving his door open and carrying nothing with him apart from his car keys. When she’d asked him where he was going out of curiosity and slight worry, he’d said nothing, hadn’t even registered her presence. His eyes were vacant, and he looked slightly ill, and he got in his car and drove away. Rachel told them the police weren’t interested because they didn’t believe there was anything to worry about since he seemed to have left out of his own will. Typical police behaviour.

Dirk was definitely interested, but he was also pretty sure he’d never been to a more boring house in his entire life. Nothing in David Derosa’s house indicated anything out of ordinary. Which would have been fine even, if it wasn’t for the fact that nothing indicated anything about his personality either. It wasn’t a sterile, pristine house or anything like that. It did look like someone had lived in there – but there just wasn’t anything interesting about it.

No mysterious notes left around, no indication that he was part of some secret cult, no posters about 80’s rock stars that had disappeared… The only thing that was even remotely interesting was a jar of Ben & Jerry’s that had been left melting on the living room table.

”Really, the only impression I got off him was that he liked peanut butter ice cream,” Dirk told Assistent later.

He was, once again, sitting on Assistent’s desk, telling Assistent everything so he could create a new file for the case. He found that going over the details again out loud helped him to think and see if he’d missed anything. But with this disappearance he was at a loss.

”I thought there might be something special about the Ben & Jerry’s, but it had gone rancid, it was horrible,” he said, scrunching up his nose in disgust at the memory.

”Wait, did you taste it?” Assistent asked.

His voice did that funny thing again, like his vocal chords went on a roller coaster ride. Dirk had noticed that this happened often whenever Assistent was surprised or worked up, and it was heartwarmingly hilarious. Dirk was aware that his own mannerisms were quite weird too, so it was delightful to interact with someone who was occasionally even more dramatic than himself.

”Yeah,” he admitted. ”It was the only thing that the universe seemed to be pointing me towards.”

”Ew,” Assistent said wisely.

After he’d sampled the ice cream Farah had pointed out that their most sensible option was to try to track down the car he’d driven off with. Rachel couldn’t remember the plate number, but she’d told them that Derosa worked at the local mechanic’s.

They paid a visit to his work place, where his coworkers did indeed remember his registry plate from heart – Dirk supposed it was a Mechanic Thing to remember something as boring as that – but they didn’t have much insight to offer on the mystery itself. They had noted that Derosa had seemed rather ill for a week or so, but it had been nothing alarming, they hadn’t really thought anything about it until now that he was gone.

”What if he just drove himself to a hospital?” Assistent suggested.

”Well, he could have, and we’re going to ask around the hospitals nearby tomorrow, but I don’t think he did. Rachel _insisted_ it was out of character for him not to even acknowledge her, and I have a strong inkling that this is a Case instead of us finding him tomorrow at the hospital in the hands of a regular manflu or something, even if all I’m getting from this case so far is rancid milk products,” Dirk said, ending his explanation on a dejected note.

”Do you know how to track plates?” Farah broke into their conversation suddenly. She’d been pacing around, tuning in and out and in again on Dirk’s story.

”Me?” Assistant asked, since she was looking at him.

”Yeah. I assume they did that at Blackwing?” she said.

”Well, maybe, but I don’t have access to that sort of thing anymore, so no,” he said, a little confused.

”Are you sure?” Farah asked warily.

”Am I sure I don’t have access anymore? _Yes!_ Jesus, I’m not a spy, okay,” he said, sounding annoyed. Then he looked at Dirk sharply. ”Don’t say it.”

”I wasn’t going to,” Dirk said, and let out a sharp breath in disbelief, pretending he hadn’t been about to say exactly what Assistent had thought he would.

”I guess I’ll have to ask my brother for another favor, then,” Farah sighed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again comments are very welcome! ♥


	3. The Death of a Good Jacket

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LISTEN…. I can’t believe I’d named the guy who disappeared MICHAEL derosa and then amitai tweets that assistent’s name is michael so I had to go change it to david derosa… proof #2 that I’m somehow holistic apparently
> 
> also listen…….. I don’t know how tracking plates works okay. Forgive me. I don’t know shit my dudes. I don’t know what lieutenants are either. I don’t know anything.
> 
> BTW this chapter is long as fuck

”Soo… how does one become a lieutenant for the CIA, then? And what’s it like?” Dirk asked a couple of days later.

”Sir, your buttcheek’s smothering my calendar,” Assistent pointed out in lieu of a reply.

Dirk supposed that the fifty-something days of having to address Friedkin as ’sir’ all seriously had made Assistent feel sourly about the title, and was now using it ironically with Dirk. He couldn’t be bothered to feel offended about it, though, since it meant that Assistent was comfortable with him enough to be snarky.

”Oh, so that’s what it was,” Dirk said, and lifted himself a little off the desk so he could save the uncomfortable object from further suffocation. ”Sorry.”

Assistent put the calendar aside with a short huff of laughter.

”But really,” Dirk prompted.

Assistent stretched his shoulders and thought for a while.

”Well. I had some military training… and then a bunch of tests and interviews to get security clearance, signing a bunch of stuff… stuff that’s supposed to be classified, so I’m not supposed to be telling you, you know,” he said, but he didn’t seem to really mind Dirk’s questions.

”It’s hard to imagine you in some military training camp sort of thing,” Dirk said without thinking, which was a common thing for him to do.

”Why?” Assistent asked dubiously.

 _Because, like me, you look like a jumpy twink who isn’t good with taking orders from burly men_ , Dirk thought, except this time kept his mouth shut and shook his head.

”Just a vibe,” he said airily. ”So, are you still a lieutenant even though you don’t work for Blackwing anymore?”

”I mean, technically? But not really for CIA? Like, when I resigned from Blackwing the whole project was in turmoil so they just let me go without a lot of paperwork. I guess the project has always been a mess and CIA doesn’t even care about it, they don’t really even understand the need for it and I think it’s controlled by whoever has their shit together at the right moment,” Assistent explained.

Dirk nodded, thinking of something. ”Someone who has their shit together… like the Bart-gu- I mean, Ken?”

”Project Alpha?” Assistent clarified. ”Yeah, there was something going on with him before I left.”

Dirk shook his head and pushed Ken out of his mind; he didn’t even know him, and he definitely didn’t like him after he’d shot him in the leg.

”Should I be calling you Lieutenant?” Dirk wondered out loud.

”Well, no… I mean, it’d sound kinda dumb when I’m your ’desk boy’ or whatever,” he said with a small laugh.

”Is it anticlimactic to go from a top secret government project to answering the phone for a…,” Dirk thought back to what Assistent had said to him when he’d first offered the job, ”...bunch of freaks?”

Assistent shrugged.

”Yeah, sort of, but this is actually pretty fun,” he confessed.

Dirk gave him a wide smile at that, and Assistent looked up and smiled back at him for a moment as well, which caused a pleasant, warm emotion to surge in Dirk.

When the universe had suggested to him that he should hire Assistent, he’d thought it was mainly out of necessity, but by now he’d found himself looking forward to their conversations together. There was just something inarguably likeable about the man. Perhaps it was because he reminded Dirk just enough of himself to make him someone to relate to. A non-holistic kindred spirit, if you will. Or perhaps because he’d spent quite a lot of time with him by now and simply liked him for what he was.

Except he realized he still didn’t even know his first name, which was weird, but in retrospect not that weird when you considered the chaotic way in which Dirk gets to know new people.

”What should I be calling you?” Dirk asked.

”Assistent’s fine, really.” he replied sincerely.

”But what’s your first name? I’m curious. You know everything about me, you know,” Dirk pointed out.

”Well, not _everything_ ,” Assistent said with amusement. Then he looked a bit shy. ”It’s Michael.”

Dirk grinned again, glad that he’d been confided in like this, and repeating his name in his head. He’d gotten so used to the idea that his new assistant’s name was so unusual that the fact that he had a completely normal first name felt funny to him.

He felt like they’d achieved some sort of milestone, and he wished he could toot a party blower and yell ’FRIENDSHIP’, but that would probably make Assistent cringe, so he thought better of it. Also, he didn’t have any party blowers.

They smiled at each other for a while and settled into companionable, idle conversation, talking about nothing important, which in itself felt important to Dirk and made him think again how far they’d come when he compared this moment to all the chaos with Blackwing, the knights and Mona.

He glanced at Mona quickly, almost fearing that she’d decide to use this moment to turn into something scary, but she was still a pleasingly verdant plant, so there was nothing new with that.

At that moment there was a loud knock on the window of their agency, however. Dirk jumped a little, and turned to look. He felt himself grin again when he saw a very familiar shape behind the glass.

”Oh my God, it’s Tina!” he exclaimed, and waved at her.

She was balancing multiple cups of takeaway coffee on her arms and grinning back. Dirk wondered how she’d managed to knock with all of those coffees. Had she juggled them?

He rose to go open the door for her, walking backwards so he was facing Assistent.

”The very Tina from Bergsberg that I told you about, if you remember,” he explained. Then, as an afterthought and accompanied with a cheeky grin, he added: ”Farah’s girlfriend.”

”Heeeyyy!” Tina shouted happily as soon as she was in. ”Dirk-o! And a new guy!”

”Hi,” Assistent said, and busied himself with some papers.

”What are you doing here! You didn’t say you were coming,” Dirk said, and then hastily gestured to Assistent and explained to Tina who he was. She didn’t seem fazed by his presence at all.

”I thought I’d spice up your lives a little, surprise you, ya know?” Tina grinned and set the coffees down.

It wasn’t the first time she’d visited their agency; after the months that followed the Wendimoor case they’d all visited each other as often as their jobs spared them. It was most often Tina who visited them. Dirk would like to think it’s because she’s so impressed with their shiny Detective Agency, but he knew it was mainly because of Farah.

”Where’s the prettiest member of your gang?” Tina asked, looking around.

”Oh, Farah’s having dinner with her brother,” Dirk said.

In exchange for helping them with tracking down David Derosa’s car, Farah’s brother had requested a favor from Farah as well: some quality family time. Farah had gone very grudgingly.

”Sike! I was talking about Todd, actually,” Tina said and punched Dirk’s arm.

”Todd’s looming around somewhe-”

”Nah, I was talking about Farah,” Tina interrupted him with a grin. ”I brought you some coffee real quick, but I’ll drop by again later, I’ve got some errands to run first, kay? Tell Farah I came by.”

She winked and pointed finger guns at both Dirk and Assistent, and then promptly danced out to the streets again.

”She’s great,” Dirk sighed with fondness. Then he looked at Assistent accusingly. ”Hey, how come you never bring me any coffee?”

”Didn’t know it belonged in the job description, _sir_ ,” Assistent said, and helped himself to some coffee. Then he paused with the cup on his lip. ”And didn’t you mention you don’t even like coffee at some point?”

”Well, yeah, but it’s the thought that counts,” Dirk said defensively. ”Maybe I’d like those sugary syrupy coffees from Starbucks?”

 

* * *

  
When Farah eventually returned, it was Assistent who informed her of Tina’s visit; which was, after all, quite natural since a part of his job was informing everyone what was happening and who had called on them.

”Miss Black? Your girlfriend dropped by earlier and told to inform you,” he said diligently.

Dirk suppressed a laugh and quickly dashed to his office for cover. He lurked behind the door to observe.

”Uh. What?” Farah said, frozen mid-step. ”Girlfriend? I don’t have a- what? Tina isn’t my- wait, I mean- who were you talking about?”

Dirk put his hands to his mouth to stop him from giggling.

”Oh, umm, Tina… Tevetino? I was under the impression that… uh,” Assistent faltered. Dirk felt a tiny bit sorry for him; Farah, having overcome some of her confusion, was looking at him in a way that would strike fear into the hearts of men and amphibians alike.

” _God dammit, Dirk_ ,” he heard Assistent sigh.

”DIRK!” Farah yelled, having apparently heard this sigh as well.

”What? No, I didn’t say anything!” Dirk lied and poked his head through the door. ”He probably just assumed, an honest mistake to make, really.”

Farah rolled her eyes. ”I’m not even going to reply to that.”

Dirk thought it might be safe to leave the cover of his door, since Farah didn’t look actually upset. Probably because she was secretly very happy about the news of Tina’s arrival. Yes, Dirk was sure he saw poorly concealed heart-eyes now. He nodded to himself. Nothing would get past a detective like him.

”How’d the dinner go?” he asked, stepping into the lobby.

”It was okay,” Farah said vaguely and shrugged, not really letting anything on, which probably meant that it had been eventful and emotionally exhausting. ”It took some convincing but my brother said he’ll see what he can do about the plate, but it isn’t easy or fast to track down a single car, especially when Derosa hadn’t been under surveillance before his disappearance.”

Dirk nodded. ”Well, it’s something. But I bet I’ll have solved the case anyway before we even find the car,” he said confidently.

”Have you had any ideas yet?” Farah asked.

”Well… no,” Dirk admitted. The nearby hospitals hadn’t provided anything either; Derosa hadn’t checked himself in at any point. ”But I’m sure they’ll come.”

”Right. Anyway, I told my brother to contact us through our agency’s email, since I don’t think it’s safe for him to tell us important case information like that through a text. In case, I don’t know, someone still tracks our phones. Or his,” she said. Then she looked at Assistent again. ”So let us know when the email comes through?”

Assistent nodded. He looked slightly awed. Dirk realized that Farah had just trusted him with confidential information, and even though the location of a single car wasn’t that big in the scheme of things, it certainly looked like she had started to trust Assistent.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It turned out that by ’errands’ Tina had actually meant ’buying something nice to Farah because I’m In Love With Her’. At least that’s how Dirk saw it, because when she returned a little later she presented a box of chocolates and a coffee mug to a blushing Farah.

”Tina,” she said, although it sounded more like a high-pitched chirp. ”You didn’t need to.”

She tried to hug Tina while at the same time trying to accept the presents offered to her, which resulted in Farah holding the presents but squashing them between her and Tina as they embraced.

”I found a place where you get to commission mugs, like they print the text for you and everything while you wait,” Tina explained, as Farah turned the mug over in her hands.

Dirk came closer to look. The font on the mug was that cheesy old western font that was used in all the cheap cowboy movies and it spelled out ’THE COOLEST DEBUTY SHERIFF IN BERGSBERG’.

”I love it,” Farah said with a bashful grin. ”But… you’re the coolest debuty sheriff in Bergsberg.”

Tina smiled. ”No, you are. Says so on the mug and everything.”

Watching those two flirt might have made the average man gag from all the sweetness, but Dirk was a great lover of sweet things and therefore felt a giddy happiness for both of them swelling in his chest.

Farah inspected the box of chocolates next, together with Dirk. The design on the cover depicted an average looking street view of a couple of houses. The colourful text on the cover boldly advertised: ’We have not 3, not 5… but _40 different chocolate flavors!_ ’. Inside the box the chocolates were arranged on a plastic tray, and there were pictures of each type of chocolate on the lid.

Farah looked at the pictures, scanning the ingredients quickly with her eyes, and then looked at Tina with a sorry looking expression.

”Oh, Tina... I’m allergic to peanuts,” she said, pursing her lips but somehow smiling at the same time. ”These all have peanuts in them.”

”Fuck! No way,” Tina said, clutching at her hair. She looked devastated for a moment. Then she thought of something. ”Well, more for me, I guess? I was kind of drooling after those from the moment I bought them.”

Farah laughed. ”Yeah, you can eat them all. I don’t mind.”

Tina took a piece of chocolate from the box and then, winking at Farah, proceeded to eat it in a frankly seductive way. It was rather too intimate even for Dirk, who suddenly realized he was third wheeling big time. Farah was blushing hard and trying to look away while also finding it hard not to look, and Tina was grinning in a mischievous way which indicated that she was messing with them on purpose.

”Uh, um, I actually have something for you as well,” Farah said to break the tension, and finally looked away so she could fetch the item while Tina laughed. ”Well, it’s not really from me, Todd gave it to me so I could give it to you.”

She picked up the shirt that she’d left waiting on the lobby’s sofa and handed it to her.

”He still has a couple of these,” she explained.

”Hooooly shit! No way!” Tina yelled, unfurling the Mexican Funeral shirt and arranging it across her chest to see how it might look like on her. She bounced on the balls of her feet. ”This is so cool, _so cool_.”

Dirk was pretty sure that Todd had secretly started getting more of those shirts made when Tina had told him he had a fanbase, which probably meant that Tina’s shirt wasn’t authentic, retro tour merch. But he didn’t have the heart to tell her that.

 

* * *

 

 

Sometimes Dirk suspected the universe malfunctioned from time to time. Like it had a sign over it that said ’we have maintenance issues and we’re trying to fix them as soon as possible, sorry for the trouble!’ At least, that’s what it felt like to him, when an abundant handful of days had passed and he _still_ hadn’t bumped into any new clues.

Now that Assistent had started bringing him coffee like a good assistant he was regularly caffeinated (or probably just on a sugar rush from all the syrups in them), which was _great_ but it made the current idleness with the case even worse. He tried to follow his instincts and go where was supposed to go, but nothing was calling to him. He’d dashed around the city with Todd, sure that something would come up if he just went out there and threw himself at the universe’s mercy, but they’d just ended up sitting around in a half-vacated Pizza Hut until they had to admit that it wasn’t possible to force fate.

Something in him told him to just hang around Tina now that she’d come to see them. Maybe the universe was giving him a small holiday? He felt guilty about sitting around and laughing with his friends when David Derosa was missing and they didn’t know why, but there was nothing else to do.

At least following the developments in Farah and Tina’s relationship proved interesting. Somehow they’d gotten to the point where they actually went on dates without addressing the fact that they were dates.

For their current date they’d planned a whole evening full of adventures; apparently they were going to the cinema, dinner and some sort of star-gazing picnic. It made Dirk’s heart ache with secondhand happiness, but with wistfulness as well. He wished someone would take him on dates like that.

Dirk’s somewhat melancholy musings were interrupted when he heard Assistent let out a small ”oh” from his desk. He lifted his head, although that didn’t do much since he was lying down on the sofa and couldn’t see anything past the computer screen that covered Assistent’s face.

”What?” he asked lazily. He realized he’d been clutching the empty chocolate box Tina had bought for Farah (and which she’d consumed with impressive speed), like some sort of forlorn teenager dreaming about boys in their bed. He let the box fall and shook his head to get over himself.

”It’s Miss Black’s- I mean, Farah’s – brother. He sent an email, the car has been found. There’s an address,” Assistent replied.

Dirk jumped up. ”Oh _thank God_ ,” he breathed out. Finally there was something he could do.

He dashed upstairs to the apartment to get Todd, who said they’d have to try to make the investigation brief because he was meeting up with Amanda later because the Rowdies were driving through town. Dirk nodded. There seemed to be some progress happening with Todd and Amanda’s relationship, thank heavens for that. Having the two Brotzmans fighting didn’t do any good for the balance of the universe.

”Should we take Farah’s car?” Todd wondered. ”Do you think she’ll mind?”

Dirk waved her hand. ”Nah, she’s too in love to notice.”

Assistent was waiting for them at the agency’s door when they got down. He looked hesitant about something. He turned around to go back to his desk, but then turned back around again. His halting movements looked like he was standing on top of a roomba.

”Um,” he said finally, after Todd and Dirk had decided that he wasn’t probably going to say anything and had reached for the front door. ”Good luck out there.”

Then he walked back to his desk before they had time to react.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Todd drove them there since he didn’t trust Dirk with cars anymore, especially Farah’s car. The area where Derosa’s car had been found was littered with detached houses, but it didn’t look particularly suburban, more like a derelict alley of warehouses where people inexplicably lived. In other words: it was a shady area, but not aggressively shady. More like a place that absolutely nobody gave a toss about.

Farah’s brother hadn’t told the police about the car since it was supposed to be a secret that he was helping them out, which meant that they had ample opportunity to investigate without being disrupted. It also meant that if things went to shit nobody would be around to rescue them. Dirk hoped that such a thing wouldn’t happen, for the obvious reason that he didn’t fancy them dying, but also because he hadn’t stopped to change his nice jeans into The Gunshot Trousers.

Todd double-checked the address where Derosa’s car was supposed to be, and then parked Farah’s car at a parking lot far enough from the address so they could be sneaky but close enough so that they could run back to the car quickly if necessary.

The streets were quiet and dim. Dirk realized he was wearing his bright turquoise leather jacket, which was quite noticeable. He froze for a second and then adopted a different walking style.

”What the hell are you doing?” Todd whispered to him.

”I’m trying to walk confidently, so we don’t look like we’re sneaking around,” Dirk explained as if it was obvious.

”You look like a robot that’s trying to blend in, you dipshit,” Todd said. He dug out his phone and opened Google Maps, and then held out his phone in the way that anyone who walked past them would see that they’re looking at a map. ”Let’s pretend we’re lost?”

”Oh, brilliant,” Dirk said excitedly. ”Should we actually get lost, though? Would that help?”

”What?” Todd frowned. ”No? C’mon. And walk like a human person.”

Although they knew the address, it took them a while to find the correct house since they all looked the same and Derosa’s car had been haphazardly hidden under a tarp, but eventually they spotted it.

”This is dumb. We didn’t bring any weapons. Or, Farahs,” Todd lamented when they stopped to hesitate behind a fence.

”You should totally have brought the blaster thingy weapon,” Dirk agreed.

”Well I might have remembered it, if you hadn’t insisted we leave in such a hurry!” Todd said in annoyance.

”I was critically bored, Todd. We had to leave in a hurry,” Dirk defended himself.

”Couldn’t you have taken your boredom out on bothering Assistent?” Todd asked. ”That’s part of his job isn’t it? To be annoyed by you.”

”But I’d bothered him all morning already,” Dirk said and waved his hand dismissively. He really had. By now everybody was used to Dirk hanging around Assistent a lot and pestering him about various things. Todd in fact seemed to like it, since it meant that Dirk’s energy was more divided now and Todd could have some much needed alone time every now and then.

Todd peeked around the fence.

”Someone might notice we’re lurking around, we should do something,” he said.

”Let’s just go in,” Dirk suggested. ”The house looks abandoned.”

Todd looked at him like he wanted to complain, but he stayed silent and glanced at the house again.

”It kinda does,” he admitted.

The lights were out, there were no other cars or vehicles of any kind apart from Derosa’s, and the entire exterior of the house gave off the vibe of a forgotten garden shed. Or a carless garage that’s just full of unfinished projects and musty mattresses.

”This looks like a place where someone would dump a car before getting rid of it properly,” Todd summed it up.

Dirk decided to go for it and crossed the front yard of the house briskly, trying to look casual but ending up crouching a little and taking short, quick steps that probably made him look like he had a desperate need to pee. Maybe that was a good cover? He was just in a hurry to get in the house to pee. Yup, nothing suspicious to see here.

He knocked on the door loudly before Todd had time to stop him.

”What are you doing!” Todd hissed, running after him.

They stood at the door for probably at least two minutes in complete silence, breathing quietly. There were no movements inside the house.

”Told you,” Dirk said with satisfaction in his voice.

They decided to take a look at the car first now that they knew they weren’t observed from the house. Predictably, it turned out that Derosa wasn’t in the car at all. Nor in the trunk. The car was just as ordinary as Derosa’s house, so they gave up on it and took a look at the house. There were high hedges surrounding the sides and back of the house which provided some cover from possible curious neighbors, but they ran around the house quickly anyway until they found a badly latched window they could climb through.

Once they were inside, they quickly discovered what sort of place they were in. It definitely wasn’t just someone’s home, it looked like nobody actually lived there. The most normal home-like pieces of furniture looked dusty and unused, and most of the space was taken up by an oddly vast amount of tables, industrial fridges, boxes and test tubes.

”That thing you said about this place looking like a place to dump a car?” Dirk said to Todd, letting his eyes roam around the room. ”Doesn’t it also look like a safe lair where like a villain would come to do stuff away from their home so no one sees them?”

”Yeah, actually,” Todd said, nodding slowly. He was rummaging through the boxes. ”There’s just chemistry equipment and shit here… What kind of villain, though?”

”I don’t know,” Dirk said, frowning. Then he breathed in sharply. ”What if Derosa’s secretly a villain?”

”When would he have the time, though?” Todd asked. ”Didn’t his neighbor say she always saw him come home, and his coworkers all know him?”

”Yeah, it doesn’t add up,” Dirk said disappointedly. ”This place makes no sense. Why isn’t there, like, blood or something interesting? Why is his car here? Who put it there?”

They went through the house, inspecting everything. But the items in the boxes and the science-y things revealed nothing. The equipment was clean and ready for use, and there weren’t any cool plans lying around.

It had gotten very dark outside by the time they’d gone through every box, and Todd was getting impatient because he wanted to leave so he wouldn’t be late for meeting up with Amanda.

A desperation fuelled by frustration filled Dirk; he’d been waiting for the universe to give him something and he’d been so sure that this place would provide him with answers that he didn’t want to accept their defeat.

”We haven’t looked in here yet!” Dirk said frantically, and strode over to the row of fridges.

He started pulling the doors of them open one by one so fast that the fridges wobbled a little from the force. Empty. Empty except with one empty container sitting solitarily on the shelf. Empty. Empty.

When he opened the fifth, however, something happened.

He yanked the door open with such ardent passion that the big vat that had been stored inside the fridge – which he hadn’t had time to notice yet - keeled over with tremenduous velocity and dumped its contents all over Dirk.

Suddenly a shower of green, extremely sticky and disgusting slime had enveloped him completely.

 

* * *

 

 

Dirk made his way back home dejectedly. Every time he took a step, he could feel different sensations which he wished he couldn’t feel, such as something dripping down his neck, or a squelching noise from his shoe accompanied by a substance seeping deeper into his sock. This evening was a mess; they hadn’t found proper answers and now he’d probably gotten slime all over Farah’s car’s front seat as well.

Todd had dropped him off near their street before speeding off to meet Amanda. The return ride home had been silent, Dirk feeling righteously upset about the turn of events that had resulted in his current slimy state, and Todd sensing his unhappiness and not daring to say anything because he seemed to know that his words probably wouldn’t help.

Dirk couldn’t help but feel slightly resentful about everything and everyone at that moment. As happy as he was for Farah and Tina, and as much as he loved to see Todd repairing his relationship with Amanda, he felt jealous about the fact that _he_ didn’t have anything to distract him from the lack of progress he was making with the case.

He felt lonely and tired and the slime was the cherry on top, and all he wanted to do was to take a long shower and perhaps have a little cry under a blanket.

But when he reached their building and was about to commence his plans for the rest of the evening, he noticed that the lights were still on in their agency. He frowned. Through the large window he could make out Assistent sitting at his desk, doing nothing.

He crossed the street quickly – _squelch, squelch, squelch_ – and made his way into their agency.

”Why are you still here?” he asked as soon as he was in, without any ceremony.

Assistent looked up and got up in a rush. His eyes trailed over Dirk in surprise, taking in the slime that luckily wasn’t dripping as profusely anymore – apart from that occasional descent somewhere in his neck – but had sort of caked over most of his skin and clothes (which was almost worse).

”Uh… What the hell happened to you? Are you okay?” Assistent asked.

”Define ’okay’,” Dirk sighed and made his way over to Assitent’s desk, deciding to postpone his solitary plans for later now that he could vent to someone, and feeling too powerless to walk up the stairs to the apartment anyway.

He was about to take his customary seat on the desk when he realized with dismay that he’d make a mess. He looked at the desk and felt his bottom lip start to wobble. He bit down on it and refused to start sobbing just because he was too slimy to sit on his favourite spot.

Assistent noticed his plight and turned around in circles until he found a newspaper.

”I wanted to wait up until you got back because you know, you didn’t have Miss- Farah with you and something might have happened – which, I’m guessing did? - and I didn’t have anything better to do anyway so that’s why I’m still here,” he explained while he spread the newspaper open and set it on the desk so Dirk could take a seat.

Dirk sat down gratefully.

”Were you worried?” he asked hopefully.

Assistent waved his hand. ”Just tell me what happened.”

He started recounting the not-so-eventful events. He’d gotten quite used to narrating their adventures now. Except this time Assistent wasn’t typing away for the case file like he usually was, this time he was giving Dirk his full attention while he talked. Dirk was rather touched by the gesture since he was feeling pretty shitty.

”Do you think the slime is important?” Assistent asked when he reached the end of his tale.

”I hope it isn’t, because I don’t want to encounter any more of it,” Dirk muttered, but then dug out a small container from his jacket’s pocket – his wonderful jacket that was probably beyond saving now. He slammed it on the table bitterly. ”We did bottle some of it just in case.”

Assistent picked up the jar and looked curiously at it. He opened his mouth to ask something.

”I don’t want to talk about the details of the slime just now,” Dirk complained, interrupting whatever it was that he was about to ask. His voice quivered a little.

”Oh. Do you want me to make you a cup of tea? That’s what Brits do when they’re upset, isn’t it?” Assistent asked. He looked bemused and sort of distressed, like he didn’t know what to do with Dirk.

Dirk was about to object for two reasons: one being that it was totally a cliché that all Brits drink tea all the time, and the second being that he couldn’t possibly bother Assistent’s evening any longer, but since the cliché was actually true and he didn’t want Assistent to leave just yet, he ended up nodding.

Assistent started milling around the agency right away, trying to find everything he needed. Even though Dirk, Todd and Farah had their apartment directly above upstairs, they’d still ended up getting a mini fridge, kettle and other things for their agency. Mostly because they were lazy and this way they didn’t need to make a trip upstairs if they wanted a snack.

The sound of the kettle rattling while it boiled was comforting, and so was the sight of Assistent trying to locate teabags.

Dirk took off his jacket while he waited. He inspected it and was instantly disappointed. It did indeed look terrible. The slime had made the leather all weird and lumpy and it smelled awful, like burnt car tire mixed with soil and something unknown and repulsive. He stretched out his shirt as much as he could and sniffed it to find out if the smell was everywhere. But it seemed that his jacket had got the worst of the slime shower. And his hair, he realized with a grimace.

He tossed the jacket into a nearby bin, feeling sorry for both the jacket and himself.

”There we go,” Assistent said, reappearing with a mug after a while.

He sat back down on his swivel chair and looked up at Dirk. Neither of them said anything for a while and Dirk stirred his tea, waiting for it to cool down a bit.

”Did you know that, when you disappeared from Blackwing with Mona’s help – and that weird witch-person’s – you left behind a puddle of water on your bed?” Assistent said, breaking the silence.

”Yeah? My bum was wet, too,” Dirk said, not knowing what this had to do with anything.

”Well, when we were trying to figure out how you did it… do you know what Friedkin suggested?”

”What?” Dirk asked.

”He thought you might have peed yourself invisible,” Assistent said, the corners of his lips nudging up.

Dirk breathed out sharply through his nose in amusement. The air created ripples on his tea, and he looked at them for a few seconds. Then he laughed, imagining the situation. He looked at Assistent, and they shared a smile.

Dirk felt slightly better. He sipped at his tea, deeming it cooled down enough. It appeared to be Earl Grey, although he wasn’t completely sure because it tasted kind of horrible. The milk to sugar ratio was off, and it hadn’t been steeped for a suitable time.

He kept drinking it anyway. At least Assistent had tried. He could have just gone home as soon as he knew Dirk and Todd hadn’t died or anything, but here he was, keeping Dirk company and being nice.

”What have you been up to while we were away?” Dirk asked conversationally.

Assistent shrugged. ”Watching The X-Files.”

He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk which revealed a box set of all the seasons of The X-Files and gestured to them. Ah, Of course.

”I’ve never really watched that, you know,” Dirk confessed. ”I’m not feeling the whole government plot thing it apparently has involved in it.”

”Oh, it’s not just that. It’s really cool,” Assistent said earnestly.

Dirk took another deep sip of his tea. It really was atrocious. He tried not to make a face.

”Of course you’d say that,” Dirk said. Then, before he had time to hesitate, he said: ”Maybe you could show me a good episode some time?”

Assistent nodded right away. ”Yeah, sure.”

Dirk smiled faintly to himself. He felt relieved at his answer because it meant that Assistent actually seemed to like Dirk’s company and wasn’t just around because he was their assistant.

Assistent glanced around in the short silence that ensued. His eyes settled on the bin, and then on Dirk.

”You threw your jacket away,” he noted.

”Yeah. Do I smell bad?” Dirk asked, knowing that it might be weird to ask him to smell him, but throwing caution to the wind anyway. He really wanted to know.

Assistent frowned thoughtfully, and then got up from his chair. He stepped closer to Dirk and sniffed the air experimentally.

”No…? Well, maybe your hair…,” he said, and stepped back. ”But it’s not like, awful.”

Dirk pouted at the thought of his hair.

”I bet I’ll never get all of this out,” he sighed deeply.

The sigh and the thought of his slimy hair set loose some of his melancholy and weariness again. He felt self-conscious and ugly in a way he rarely felt.

His lips wobbled again dangerously.

”I look like shit,” he complained.

He pretty much never said things like these aloud to someone else, but he was allowed to be a pissbaby for one night, wasn’t he?

”Oh, come on, it’s just a bit of slime,” Assistent said comfortingly.

He went away for a short moment, and then returned briskly with a couple of wetted tissues. He faltered for a second, but then stepped close to Dirk again, and lifted his hand which held one of the tissues. He took it to Dirk’s hair and attempted to clean the worst of the now almost crunchy slime off.

Dirk sat there meekly and let him do it. Assistent had to reach up a little since Dirk was sitting on the desk, and he looked serious and focused on his task, eyebrows gently furrowed.

Dirk had never seen Assistent this up close before, well, okay, he had in Blackwing when he’d sort of creepily yelled at him when he needed him to take him to The Boy. But he hadn’t been this close to him under _normal_ circumstances before. Well, maybe this wasn’t exactly normal either, given the fact that he was covered in weird slime. But still. His face was right in front of him. And... he was rather cute.

Dirk would have to have been an unobservant idiot not to have noticed he was cute before, but now that he was looking at him and saw all the details of his face and since the moment was pretty intimate and quiet, he sort of fully acknowledged it.

Assistent’s head and face were kind of too tiny for his features. It made his eyebrows look comical and expressive, and under those eyebrows resided his dark brown eyes which were like buttons. He looked like a little cartoon mouse. Or a puppy. It all made a rather charming picture. But he was handsome too, and Dirk liked the way his hair curled slightly at the front.

Yes, Assistent was directly in front of him, almost breathing into his face and not noticing because he was looking at Dirk’s hair, and yes, he was attractive. But Dirk wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with this information. His brain decided to be helpful by reminding him at that very moment how long it had been when he’d last gotten some or at least gotten to kiss someone. So long ago that it had been in London.

Why did he have to think of this while he was all slimy? Why?

He must have been making some sort of distressed face that Assistent took for grief over his slimy looks, because he stopped rubbing his hair with the tissue and looked at him solemnly.

”You’re pretty, sir. And the slime will wash off, and... you’ll get somewhere with the case,” Assistent assured, maybe a bit slowly and haltingly, but still very genuinely.

He picked up a new tissue and gave Dirk’s face a few gentle wipes with it.

Bloody hell, it felt nice to be touched by someone, even though it was under circumstances like this. And why did he have to be so nice, Dirk thought despairingly while Assistent exfoliated a layer of slime from his forehead. Well, Dirk was glad he was being nice because he was in a sensitive mood, but he was being so nice that Dirk felt tempted to kiss him. Just for the heck of it. Just a little. Or _maybe_ not just a little, who knows.

Was that weird considering they’d only really known each other for about a month? Although, during that month they’d been talking to each other and spending time together almost every day, Dirk countered to himself, as if he was defending his own pathetic desires to himself.

But what if it was only because he was feeling lonely and needy? It wouldn’t be fair to Assistent. Also it could end badly. He didn’t know if Assistent would even be interested in him like that. Although he _did_ just call him pretty. But oh, then again, he could have just said it out of pity.

Dirk wasn’t sure how to do these things. When he wanted to get into someone’s life he just bothered the people he liked until they were his friends, but what would he do in this case?

Assistent seemed to be done with torturing Dirk with the tissues. He lowered his hand and noticed Dirk was sort of blatantly staring at him. He blushed a bit under Dirk’s stare, flecks of red blooming delicately on his cheeks, while those unfairly cute eyes of his were looking back at him. There was a subtle splattering of freckles below his eyes that Dirk wasn’t sure he’d noticed before.

Dirk wanted to join his jacket in the bin. He looked away quickly, finding a spot on the ceiling that he decided to devote his attention to for at least a couple of seconds until he recovered from whatever had just happened to him.

Out of the corner of his eye he could just about see Assistent moving away and throwing the tissues away.

”Thank you, uh…,” Dirk said after a while, and then hesitated and stammered just a tiny bit over his next words. ”Thanks Michael. Seriously.”

Calling Assistent by his first name made Dirk blush for some preposterous reason. Maybe because he wasn’t used to using that name. Or maybe he shouldn’t have said it so tenderly. He gave up on staring at the ceiling, cast a quick look at Assistent and saw surprise on his face, like he hadn’t expected Dirk to say that either. But he recovered from his surprise quickly and gave Dirk a little smile.

”You should go shower,” he said kindly. ” _Aand_ I should probably go home.”

Dirk nodded and walked him to the door.

”You know, if you had a steady wage you could have just gotten a nice, evening-slash-overtime bonus,” Dirk pointed out, having no clue what to say and just deciding to say something that wasn’t ’hey, I’m slimy, but let’s snog’.

”Yeah… this job makes no sense,” Assistent said and shook his head a few times. Then he shrugged. ”Well, see you on Monday, then.”

He gave him a nod, another smile, and a fleeting look before he walked out and went on his way into the night.

Dirk stood at the door for a while, leaning on the door frame and watching him go. He decided to make a small change to his evening plans, trading crying under a blanket for doing some thinking under a blanket.

But not thinking about the case for once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> count how many times I say slime in this chapter and you get a prize


	4. Cats Who Hate Flirting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bit of an interlude chapter, but it's quite long again, enjoy!

Nothing new happened with the case in the week that followed the slime incident. But this time Dirk didn’t let that get him down.

His little moment with Assistent had cheered him up and spurred him to think about the man in a whole new way. When he’d seen him again the next Monday and shared some pizza and idle gossip with him he’d realized that his interest in Assistent didn’t exist out of his loneliness like he’d feared initially. He actually _really_ liked the man. He was endearing and funny and he definitely still wanted to snog him very much.

Dirk didn’t have the art of subtlety on his side and he didn’t really care for it. He wondered if it would be acceptable if he just straight up asked if Assistent fancied a snog. Or was that just something that fifteen-year-olds do during recess when the teachers aren’t looking? What would even be the right moment? Not knowing how to do that, but deciding that his tactic of bothering people until they liked him might be applicable somehow, he started clumsily flirting with him in an experimental way. He did it sort of as a joke at first so it could be brushed aside if he failed horribly, but when the ground hadn’t swallowed him whole after the first attempts it became more sincere.

He had a hunch there might be some mutual attraction between them, although there was a slight chance he could be wrong like he had been back when he was about twenty and had mistaken some guy’s behavior for interest, and had almost gotten punched in the face when he’d suggested something to him because the guy was apparently outrageously heterosexual and had taken offence. But in this case Dirk was pretty sure that Assistent was gay. I mean c’mon, he had to be. And they seemed to understand each other somehow.

And so he used the awkward flirting to see how Assistent reacted to him, but doing it was also a lot of fun since he loved pestering Assistent anyway. And _maybe_ some of his power went to his head because he liked the idea of being a boss and being sweet on his ’secretary’, like he was James Bond or something. Or, perhaps not James Bond. His delusions of grandeur didn’t stretch that far.

But he didn’t just want to bother Assistent, he wanted to repay his niceness and somehow impress him at the same time.

He wasn’t good at any of these things, however, and his chaotic nature wasn’t good at planning. Basically, it was a mess. Seducing Assistent was a mess, but he was trying, and it was fun, and it seemed to be going surprisingly well? While neither actually mentioned out loud what was going on between them, it was pretty transparent, and Assistent had started responding to some of his attempts, occasionally giving those cute little smiles of his while he did so.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

”There you go, Mikey,” Dirk said and deposited a cup of tea in front of Assistent, who looked at it confusedly, and then, having registered what Dirk said, looked at him in annoyance.

”No,” he said simply, referring to the nickname.

”Alright,” Dirk said, and mentally crossed it over from his list of nicknames. It was a short list, and didn’t yet have a name on it that wasn’t crossed over. He’d just have to content himself with calling Assistent by his actual given names for now.

”I thought I was supposed to be the ’beverage boy’?” Assistent said, now referring to the tea while directing those sincere brown eyes of his at Dirk.

”You are, but you don’t know how to make tea at all, dear,” Dirk said happily. He had a cup for himself as well, and he held it carefully so he wouldn’t spill it while he sat down on Assistent’s desk. He moved his limbs so he could sit cross-legged, which made a jar of pens fall down with a clatter.

”Jeez,” Assistent said and reached out to save the pens that were now making an expedition across the desk. ”There are chairs here too if you need the space, you know?”

”But this is my spot. Isn’t it?” Dirk asked, slightly worried because he’d sort of claimed the spot as his without really asking.

”Yeah, it is,” Assistent replied, causing a delighted grin worm its way onto Dirk’s face.

They sat drinking their teas and went on their morning routine, which had formed a few days ago and consisted of them browsing the local news online to see whether there was anything weird going on in the city that might be connected to the ongoing case. In Dirk’s case, he mainly just did Buzzfeed quizzes on his phone and pretended to read news while Assistent actually read the news on the computer.

Dirk frowned at his phone, looking at the results of the latest quiz he’d done. He wasn’t sure if Buzzfeed quite knew him. Definitely no holistic psychics involved in making the quizzes.

”Do you think I’m like Flynn Rider?” he asked.

Assistent looked up in puzzlement. ”Who?”

”From Tangled. That Disney film?” Dirk explained.

”The one with the annoying snowman?”

” _No_ , the one with all the hair and the cool lanterns.”

”I can’t remember,” Assistent said with a shrug, sounding like he didn’t much care about the subject.

Did he watch nothing besides the X-Files?

”Well, he’s kind of pompous and annoying, and good looking, oh, and he’s a thief?” Dirk tried to sum up the character.

Assistent looked at him thoughtfully, then squinted doubtfully. ”I don’t know...”

”Which part are you squinting at, the good looking one?” Dirk asked quickly.

”Are you doing Buzzfeed quizzes?” Assistent asked, sounding both judgemental and amused.

”Uhh, no,” Dirk said innocently. ”There was a news article that went ’If Dirk Gently was a Disney prince he’d be Flynn Rider’ and now I’m reading it.”

”Oh screw you,” Assistent said.

”Well, which part do you think is untrue?” Dirk asked, referring to the traits he’d used to describe the character.

Assistent thought for a short while.

”Well, you’re not a thief,” he said mysteriously and went back to browsing the news.

Dirk digested the comment. Apparently he’d just gotten called good looking but also pompous and annoying, so he wasn’t sure how to take it. He finished the rest of his tea and shrugged to himself. Oh, what the hell. He said he’s good looking. He felt himself blush with delight.

”You’re not really pompous, though,” Assistent added after a moment of silence, apparently not wanting Dirk to misunderstand his remark.

Dirk smiled brightly at him. ”Nor annoying?”

Assistent looked at him for a while, then turned back to the computer wordlessly.

”Hey!” Dirk exclaimed in mock offense.

Before Dirk had time to convince Assistent that he wasn’t really annoying, Tina sauntered in and greeted them and Assistent turned to answer the agency’s phone which had started ringing shrilly, which seemed to indicate that the universe was trying to tell Dirk that he was indeed annoying and there was nothing he could do about it.

”Where’s Farah?” Dirk asked after having switched his attention to Tina and noticing she was on her own.

”You think we’re a package deal?” Tina asked with a smirk.

”Aren’t you?” Dirk asked chipperly while Assistent talked on the phone.

Tina’s stay in Seattle had stretched to a record time of over two weeks, and by now she was planning her return back home because Sherlock was all alone in Bergsberg and she missed him, but something had made her stay and Dirk was sure it was because her and Farah’s situation was finally about to reach some point that should have been reached ages ago, and both parties seemed to sense it even though neither had done anything about it yet.

”Not yet, we aren’t,” Tina confirmed with a wink. Then she let out a mighty burp and rubbed her stomach. ”Jesus. Sorry, I must’ve been eating something weird. That’s _not_ from alcohol, though!”

”Of course not,” Dirk nodded. They were all very proud of Tina’s progress with sobriety, even though none of them had known her during her ’dark period’.

”Anyway, I did come to get her, she’s getting ready,” Tina added, referring to Farah.

Ah, so it was another date-that-wasn’t-a-date. Dirk had found them funny at first, but couldn’t really say anything teasing about it because he and Assistent seemed to be doing the same thing lately – if watching the X-Files after working hours together counted as dates-that-weren’t-dates. There had been two of those after the slime incident, since apparently Assistent had been excited to show Dirk some good episodes. Personally he thought he was a much cooler detective than either Mulder or Scully, and hadn’t so far been _that_ charmed by the show, but it was exciting to watch something that someone you liked was excited about.

”I’ll see what we can do, ma’am,” Assistent said, and put the phone down, which made Dirk turn his attention back to him.

”Wow, you guys got another case?” Tina asked before Dirk had time to.

Assistent shrugged sheepishly. ”An elderly lady lost a cat? And she’d somehow heard of us and asked us to help because the police are too busy to look for cats. Understandably.”

”Oooh, what if it _is_ a case, what if it’s part of The Case and the cat is connected to Derosa?” Dirk said and clapped his hands.

”I don’t think so…?” Assistent said sceptically. ”Are we going to look for the cat, though? She talked about a reward… You kinda need money for your bills and your excessive pizza consumption.”

”Hmmm, true,” Dirk nodded. If the reward was big enough, he could give some of it to Assistent as well. And looking for a cat could be fun anyway, he thought. Looking for cats is always fun because it may result in getting to pet the cat if found, but he was also motivated by the thought of spending the day with Assistent as well. At least, he assumed Assistent was coming with. He did say ’we’.

Also, even if Assistent didn’t believe him, he was still hopeful about the cat being connected to The Case.

”Tina, you and Farah probably don’t want to join us, or... do you?” Dirk asked cheerfully, but turned his body around completely to face Tina so that Assistent wouldn’t see him trying to signal ’please don’t join us though because I want to spend quality time with my cute secretary’ with his eyes to Tina.

”Nah,” Tina said casually, but it was clear she was trying to keep in laughter.

”Should we go look for it now?” Assistent asked. He’d been typing something on the computer and hadn’t luckily paid much attention to their exchange, because he was looking attentively at the screen.

Dirk leaned in to look. He had a wikiHow article open which was called ’How to Find a Lost Cat’. Resourceful man.

”It says cats might hide in dark places like bushes and stuff so we should use flashlights?” Assistent said. ”So our phones should do.”

”Ooh, ooh! No, wait, I have something cool!” Dirk exclaimed and hopped off the desk in search of the cool magic lightbulb invented by Patrick Spring. Or the Everbulb, as he liked to call it. It was around somewhere in his office. He’d mentioned the Everbulb very briefly to Assistent while he constructed their case files, but he didn’t really know how _cool_ it was, and Dirk wanted to impress him.

”A-ha!” he yelled when he spotted it. He picked it up, which made it light up, and carried it over to Assistent and Tina, who were both waiting for him curiously.

”Look, it’s magical! Or, science-ical. Scientific? Whatever. It lights up only when you touch it,” Dirk explained and laid it on the table right in front of Assistent.

Assistent raised his eyebrows, and wordlessly touched the lamp. It lit up. He retracted his hand. It turned itself off. He took it in his hand, which made it light up again.

”Okay, this is pretty cool,” he admitted. ”But kind of useless compared to our phones’ flashlights?”

”Don’t insult the Everbulb!” Dirk said indignantly.

”Hey, I wanna try,” Tina said, looking far more excited than Assistent was. Now there was a person with good gadget taste.

Dirk took the lightbulb from Assistent and placed it on the further edge of the desk, closer to where Tina was standing. Tina reached her hand for it, but before she had touched it the light started to flicker on and off again.

”What the hell?” Tina said, stealing the words from Dirk’s mouth.

She picked up the lightbulb in her hand, which made the light flash rapidly for a while, until it steadied and stayed on. Then she put it back down on the table, except it didn’t turn itself off like it was supposed to. It kept flickering on again.

Dirk reached for the Everbulb – it felt a bit warmer than usually – and it turned itself on normally, without any flickering. Then he set it away on the far corner of the desk so that neither Tina nor Assistent could reach it. It turned itself off when he let go.

”Maybe it got socially anxious?” he suggested disappointedly. That lamp was supposed to be magical and cool, and as alarming as it was that something seemed to be wrong with it, he was mainly miffed about the fact that it had let him down in front of his friend and his crush. ”It usually works. I’d return it to Patrick Spring, but I don’t have a receipt. And he’s dead, so there’s that too.”

”Yikes. Good thing Farah didn’t hear you say that,” Tina said and grimaced.

Dirk nodded in embarrassment. Sometimes he forgot that Farah and Spring had been close, and sometimes he said stuff without thinking about it, which made him sound rude by accident.

”Hear Dirk say what?” the lady in question asked, as she entered the agency cheerfully, looking ready to go on her and Tina’s romantic adventure or whatever it was.

”That you’re pretty,” Tina said without missing a beat. ”Because I’d be jealous.”

Farah blushed, looked at Tina, looked away again, looked back at her and then smiled at the floor in such a quick progression that it looked like she’d glitched on the spot.

”Oh, wow,” Dirk muttered to Assistent, who nodded back at him, also looking like he didn’t know how to react to those two.

Tina shot Dirk a quick look which implied she heard, and then typed something on her phone. Dirk felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. It was a text from Tina.

 

_shut the fuck up hypocrite u been flirting ur ass off with mr ass-istent lately_

 

Dirk huffed. Alright, maybe his and Assistent’s situation was eeriely similar to Farah and Tina’s, but the girls had been mooning over each other for a far longer time so he had the right to make fun of them now and then.

Another text appeared as soon as he read the first one.

 

_sorry forgot ur british and probs didnt understand that. *flirting ur ARSE off_

 

And then three other ones, while from the corner of his eye he saw Tina grinning like a shark.

 

_hey_  
_hey omg_  
_arse-istent. Arseistent_

 

Dirk huffed again and texted her back.

 

_**stop im going 2 tell him you said that and hes going 2 cry** _

 

_:( but then he can cry in your arms_

 

”Are you two texting each other?” Farah said incredulously.

”No,” they said in unison and put their phones away.

”Right,” Tina said, snapped her fingers and turned the snaps into finger guns, which she pointed at Farah. ”We’re gonna go. Have fun with the cat, y’all.”

The girls left without any further ado.

”Wait, why am I coming with you?” Assistent asked a short moment later, when Dirk was pulling on his yellow jacket all ready to go and looking at Assistent expectantly. He looked like he was only now realizing that he’d automatically agreed to join the escapade.

”Why not?” Dirk said and smiled brightly. ”I could ask Todd to come, but he finally got a new guitar and seemed like he’s going to be preoccupied with it all day, so.”

Assistent nodded. There was a silence that lasted a couple of seconds, during which they could distantly hear the sound of some aggressive riff that most likely came from upstairs.

”Can we leave the agency unattended?” Assistent said in a worried tone even as he put his jacket on.

He was wearing all dark colours again, and he’d gone back to his more formal clothes – the jumper hadn’t apparently been a favourite – but as some sort of acquiescence to his new relaxed work environment he’d begun wearing a red pair of Converse shoes on his feet. Dirk loved the contrast, and enjoyed the sight of the red shoes while he could because he was pretty sure that soon enough Assistent would find them too bright and buy a black pair instead.

”Yeah, yeah, sure,” Dirk assured him, and took a pen and scribbled ’OUT LOOKING FOR A CAT COME BACK LATER’ on a pink post-it note. He drew a stick-figure cat under the words, showed it to Assistent with a thumbs-up and attached it to the agency’s door as they left.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

They had no idea where to start. It was a big city, so even though they’d gotten a description of the cat from its owner, it didn’t exactly help. Dirk had suggested covering Assistent in catnip, but he hadn’t liked the idea.

They saw plenty of cats wandering around and lounging on rooftops, but they weren’t The Cat. Assistent also disliked Dirk’s suggestion that maybe the cat had camouflaged itself by changing its fur and maybe some of the cats they encountered was The Cat except in disguise.

It was funny doing detective work with Assistent, especially when he started getting pissed off when they hadn’t found the feline fugitive by dinner time. He became all squeaky and frustrated. But as hilarious as it was, Dirk eventually took pity on him and suggested they have some dinner, and for some reason they ended up eating pasta at a place that was actually rather nice and secluded and Dirk definitely felt like they’d accidentally gone on a real date.

Dirk made a mental note not to tell Tina about it. She’d definitely call him a hypocrite now.

They discussed the Derosa case and then further plans for the rest of the day’s cat hunt, but when the obligatory important subjects had been covered they drifted to talking about life in general. Dirk listened attentively with his arm propped up on the table and chin resting on his hand while Assistent told him about his childhood, about how he’d grown up in Spokane but moved to Seattle when he’d still been quite young, what he’d been like in school (a bit of a shy nerd, apparently, but he insisted he hadn’t been completely lame), stuff like that.

Assistent talked about himself relatively openly, but Dirk noticed he skirted around the subject of his employment after becoming a lieutenant, and where he was living at that time. He realized it was probably because he still couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say where the Blackwing facility was situated. Dirk could guess how strict they’d been about keeping that information classified. Could it be that the facility was actually somewhere near Seattle, since Assistent lived here? Or maybe he’d just moved back here after he quit his job. In truth, Dirk didn’t really want to know and didn’t want to ask because he didn’t actually give a toss about Blackwing.

He did give a toss about Assistent, however, and everything he was willing to share about him interested him. In turn, Dirk found it nice to tell him about things that had nothing to do with his Project Icarus file, mundane things like his times back in England and which aspects of it he missed (and how Assistent was missing out on hobnobs), which songs he found to be the biggest earworms, how his favourite colour changed with different vibes and moods.

To Dirk’s delight it all seemed to interest Assistent as much as he’d interested Dirk, even though he did have that amusingly wide-eyed, befuddled expression on his face while he listened to Dirk talk in his usual fast, erratic way. He sort of looked like he was trying to earnestly follow and take everything in, even though the picture he was seeing made no sense. It made Dirk feel like a moving, abstract painting, which wasn’t really a bad feeling since Assistent seemed to actually like talking to him like this.

While they talked the subject of dating drifted past, with Assistent mentioning some time of his life when he’d been seeing somebody. The mention was as brief as a wave of a hand, and Dirk almost missed it, and then, seizing a chance, asked rather frantically whether Assistent was dating anybody now before he had time to change the subject again.

He received an odd look from Assistent, and a reply in the negative delivered in a tone which implied that it should have been obvious.

Well, Dirk wanted to be sure. He was bad at this stuff, and you never knew, right?

At least now he knew Assistent was single. Dirk tried not to smile too obviously while he changed the subject quickly back around to the missing cat. He looked down, and saw there was a final forkful of pasta on his plate which had been forgotten and got cold ages ago while they’d talked. He shoved it into his mouth as a distraction just in case, because he deduced it’d be harder to smile when one’s mouth is full, but then realized that now he was speaking with a mouth full of food and that wasn’t exactly attractive.

Oh well, whatever. If Assistent was into him, he probably already knew how inelegant Dirk could be, and if he was into him despite all that, well, then he was just as weird as Dirk.

Once they’d finished eating and realized how long they’d been sitting there, they decided to resume the search in the parks nearby the cat’s owner’s house, since walking around aimlessly according to Dirk’s whims hadn’t resulted in anything, and Assistent was convinced they’d find the cat hiding in a bush because that’s what the wikiHow article had said.

But by the third park the sun had set so low that the sky looked like a watercolour painting, and Dirk’s knees hurt from crawling around in the grass and peeping into bushes.

Eventually, when his knees let him know he’d had enough he straightened up, tried fruitlessly to brush some of the green grass marks from his trousers and gave his back a good stretch. While he did so, something caught his eye on the top of a brick wall that was circling sides of the park.

It was the bloody cat, leisurely sitting and watching them stumble in the bushes with flashlights. At least, it matched the description with its cream coloured fur that had a few orange stripes in it, and something about the cat looked smug enough to suggest that it knew perfectly well it shouldn’t be sitting there, so it was very probable that it was a runaway.

Dirk nudged Assistent in the ribs with his elbow.

”Oh, fucking finally,” Assistent breathed out when he’d followed Dirk’s gaze.

”Don’t swear in the presence of the cat,” Dirk whispered. ”It could get offended and leave.”

Assistent rolled his eyes at him, and they started approaching the fluffy little creature carefully. The cat didn’t budge, didn’t seem to care much about them at all, in fact. They got to the wall without troubles, but then realized they wouldn’t be able to reach so high.

”Right. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” Dirk started cajoling, but the cat paid him no attention. ”Cute little kitty, come, come.”

”You’re being too desperate,” Assistent criticized him.

Dirk sighed, crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows and nodded in the direction of the cat to indicate that he should give it a go then.

Assistent stepped forward and started calling the cat in a much quieter, gentler tone, which he punctuated with those kissy noises you make at pets. It was oddly mesmerizing to watch him do it, and Dirk realized he was staring and thinking about those kissy noises extensively.

Even though Dirk was falling for Assistent’s charms, the cat didn’t, and Dirk shook himself so he could focus on the issue.

”Right, plan B,” Dirk announced and stepped forward to stand in front of Assistent. ”Lift me and I’ll just grab the cat.”

”No, you lift me? I’m not strong enough to lift you?” Assistent said, the pitch of his voice rising with disbelief.

”Rude, yes you are,” Dirk countered.

He grabbed Assistent’s shoulders and gave a little jump in an attempt to somehow lift himself by climbing Assistent. Assistent didn’t grab a supportive hold of him, however, and instead tried to push him away while simultaneously also trying to get a hold of Dirk so _he_ could lift him instead.

It ended up being a rather pathetic tussle, where neither one was gaining the upper hand. The cat seemed to think it was too much and that it needed to be stopped, because it jumped down from the wall and leapt straight at Dirk, who miraculously managed to catch it in his arms, even though he was still almost tangled with Assistent.

”Hello, you!” Dirk said happily. Then he frowned, and looked at the cat suspiciously. ”You don’t happen to have a shark within you?”

The cat didn’t propel an invisible murderous shark forward, so Dirk thought it was probably okay. He scratched it behind its ears, and thought about Derosa.

”How is this supposed to be connected, though?” Dirk asked aloud.

”To the case?” Assistent asked, also petting the cat. His face was really close to Dirk’s. ”Maybe it isn’t?”

”But everything is connected,” Dirk said defiantly.

”Maybe everything isn’t always connected,” Assistent said with a shrug, and raised his eyes from the cat to Dirk.

Jesus, he really _was_ close to him. The cat was basically the only thing separating them, and Dirk couldn’t help but stare at Assistent’s lips. They were right there, and he couldn’t make himself look up again.

”You know what _could_ be connected?” Dirk said, sort of accidentally and sort of on purpose, aiming his tone for a cheekily seductive one but it came out rather weird and shaky. He compensated by waggling his eyebrows aggressively.

”...What?” Assistent asked quietly, and Dirk was so sure – or maybe eighty percent sure – that Assistent’s eyes had flicked down as well.

But before he could do anything about it or say ’our lips’, the cat decided to amble away again. Maybe it was a good cat; maybe it saved Dirk from being too cheesy. Or maybe it had gotten enough of their awful flirting and wanted them to focus on the issue of returning it home.

”Ow!” Assistent cried out and held his cheek. Apparently the cat had scratched him a little while it made the jump. Dirk could see something red behind Assistent’s fingers.

Dirk took off running after the cat so they wouldn’t lose it again, but while he was running he turned his head and, seized by courage, hollered back at Assistent.

”I can kiss it better once we’re done with this!”

He thought he could hear a hesitant ’oh. really?’ from behind him, but he wasn’t sure and he had to focus on not accidentally running under a car while he kept track of the cat and ran inelegantly after it, so he was distracted away from the issue.

Luckily he managed to catch the devious cat again after it made them run for a couple of minutes, and they made their way to the owner’s house exhaustedly since they’d drifted quite far away from it by now. They were at an uptown area with cozy little houses and nice gardens, and Dirk couldn’t understand why a cat would want to leave such a place.

The old lady who opened the door received the cat with open joy. She looked like a sweet person, a very epitome of a granny with her curling white, wispy hair and orange square-shaped glasses that looked like they were from the 80’s.

”Oh, Mendel!” she said to the cat, which took Dirk rather by surprise, because he’d expected older people to name their cats ’Mr Whiskers’ or something, which was probably mean of him to assume.

She gave them fifty dollars each and insisted that they’d come over for some cake some time so she could thank them properly. Assistent nodded a little awkwardly at the invitation, but Dirk was always up for some cake and nice people, so he promised her they’d definitely return.

It was truly growing dark when they walked back to the agency, and while they walked the streets companionably, talking about the universe and cats and other things, Dirk pondered what he’d do once they actually reached the agency. Assistent was supposed to go home, wasn’t he? But he’d promised to kiss Assistent’s little battle wound better. Oh dear, had he inadvertently invited Assistent in for a snog?

But he didn’t get to figure it out, because Tina and Farah were returning from their date, and they reached the door at the same time as them.

Tina was holding her stomach, and she was walking with a bit of a crouch while Farah looked on with worry. Tina nodded at them.

”Find the cat?” she asked a little groggily.

”Yeah… what happened to you?” Dirk replied, baffled.

”She got a bad stomach ache on the way home, I’m going to fetch some paracetamol for her,” Farah explained, and hopped up the stairs to the apartment two at a time.

”I’m gonna sit down right now,” Tina announced, and since the agency was right there and the stairs didn’t look inviting, she went in and plopped down on Assistent’s chair with a groan.

A weird thing happened the moment she sat down. The Everbulb that had malfunctioned earlier and which was resting on the desk started blinking rapidly again, except even faster than before, and it was vibrating slightly. It looked brighter, too. The intensity of it all looked worrying enough, but what was worse was that Tina started looking far more queasy than she had a few moments before. A sweat broke on her forehead and she looked pale, and she gripped the desk desperately.

Dirk went to touch the light, but it was so hot that he had to withdraw his hand after his fingers had just brushed it. He didn’t get it. Surely the malfunction couldn’t be coincidental anymore. And what did it have to do with Tina?

Meanwhile Tina’s expression changed to the sort of blank look that precedes vomiting, which Assistent was quick to notice. He grabbed the bin next to the desk and handed it over to Tina just in time, and then gagged himself at the sound of Tina vomiting with tremendous volume. He covered his ears and closed his eyes.

”I’m sorry, I can’t deal with vomit,” he said weakly, and retired to the furthest corner of the room.

”What’s going on?” said Todd, who had come down to say hi. He hovered by the treshold. ”Farah said Tina’s feeling a bit sick but this sounds like an epidemic.”

Farah ran down with the paracetamol right behind Todd and froze for a moment when she saw Tina groaning into the bin, and then went to her in worry. She noted the vomit.

”Did it help? Are you feeling better?” she asked, brushing aside a couple of sweaty strands of hair from Tina’s forehead.

”No,” she whined.

”Something’s up with the magic light bulb,” Dirk almost yelled in explanation. He felt a little breathless with confused excitement.

”Dirk, not now,” Farah scolded.

”No, seriously, look,” he said, and gestured to the Everbulb, which was still burning brightly even though nobody was touching it. It did the weird flickering now and then until it steadied, and then did it again.

”Yeah, that lamp doesn’t like me,” Tina nodded in agreement.

Todd seemed to be seized with an idea, and nudging Farah aside, he took hold of the swivel chair and pushed Tina away towards the agency’s door. He accidentally put too much force into the push, because the chair spun around a couple of times.

”Whoaaa, this isn’t nice!” Tina yelled hoarsely, gripping the bin and closing her eyes.

”Sorry! I didn’t mean for it to spin,” Todd said sheepishly, and then turned around to look at the light bulb again. Dirk followed his gaze. It had turned itself off.

”It… stopped?” Farah said and frowned deeply. ”Is it reacting to Tina?”

”It did that before this morning,” Dirk nodded. ”Thought it was broken, but this is weird, right?”

Todd went to touch the Everbulb, grabbed it and put it back on the table. It worked like it was supposed to, and turned off when he’d put it down. Then he picked it up again, and tentatively walked over to Tina. He waved it up and down in front of her, which made the light flicker again and grow brighter. Tina’s stomach rumbled audibly, and she looked like she was going to be ill again.

”Shit, okay,” Todd said, and backed off. He dropped the Everbulb on the table and rubbed his hand. ”Ow, it got hot.”

”Definitely something to do with Tina,” Dirk said, almost bouncing on the spot.

”Right, everyone get near the light bulb to make sure,” Farah said authoritatively.

Dirk dragged Assistent away from the corner where he’d been cowering, and everyone excepting Tina gathered round the Everbulb. Nothing happened.

”Tina?” Farah said in a gentle voice, approaching her and laying her hand on her shoulder. ”Have you done anything unusual lately? Anything… weird?”

”Uhh, uh? I’m still sober, I haven’t been to any different dimensions,” she counted off with her fingers, looking and sounding a little panicked. ”Haven’t encountered any wizards, either?”

”Could you have eaten something wrong? Although I think the both of us have been pretty much eating the same food during your stay here, and I’m fine,” Farah pondered and rubbed Tina’s shoulder slowly.

”I’ve never heard of a food poisoning that would cause lamps to go nuts,” Tina said, and then shrugged forlornly. ”I can’t remember eating anything weird.”

They all fell silent, trying to recall recent events. Dirk’s mind was empty. If it wasn’t a normal food poisoning, what was it? An alien disease? He tried to make himself think of things that had happened around him. The missing cat. Finding the missing cat. Almost kissing Assistent. Wait, no, that had nothing to do with Tina. The slime? That was weird. But it hadn’t happened to Tina either. That was when Assistent had cleaned his face with those tissues… Oh, bloody hell.

Luckily his thoughts were interrupted by Assistent himself, who had an idea. He raised his hand slightly, like he was in class or something.

”This was about two weeks ago, so I don’t know if it’s relevant anymore, but didn’t Miss Tev-, I mean, Tina,” he corrected himself, which made Dirk smile to himself, ”buy that box of chocolates? Which no one else but her ate?”

Farah nodded slowly. ”The ones I couldn’t eat because they had nuts in them? Yeah, could it be that?”

Tina shrugged, still holding the bucket and not looking any better. ”Tasted good, though. And I didn’t pick them up from the street or anything, it was like a legit shop. Except okay, it sorta looked like one of those independent pop-up stores?” She frowned, and seemed to think back to the place, and then added in a mumble: ”Maybe it did look kinda makeshifty. But I don’t see how it could have-”

And then she interrupted herself to throw up again.

”Whatever’s the case, I’m taking you to a hospital right now,” Farah said to Tina firmly, then looked at the rest of them. ”If we still have that box somewhere, see if the light bulb reacts to it? I mean, this is investigation-worthy, right?”

”Definitely,” Dirk said, nodding eagerly, already pushing thoughts of snogging out of his mind and replacing them with excitement about not knowing what the hell was happening around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oooooh what’s going on with tiinaaA? you'll have to wait and see!
> 
> btw correct me if I was wrong in saying that dirk & co never found out where the blackwing facility is? like, farah and todd never found it and dirk was probably like. blindfolded/something when they took him in and then he got out via magic so?? who knows
> 
> as always I love comments so let me know what you thought you're all great!


	5. Sinister Retail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY IT'S BEEN SO LONG OMG

The three of them stared at the dumpster. It was a big one, one of those that resided on street corners and contained all of the accumulated trash of the street. Maybe even secrets as well. People threw lots of different things away. It also smelled unappealing.

”Rock, paper, scissors?” Todd suggested, holding out the hand that wasn’t holding Patrick Spring’s light bulb.

They nodded and duelled it out in the bright morning light. Assistent lost.

”Oh, no,” he moaned devastatingly and looked at the dumpster with trepidation. ”We had that chocolate box lying around for like a week and when I finally threw it away we need to find it again?”

They peeked into the vast chasm of trash. It was impossible to tell with just one look where their trash was since everyone used black garbage bags and nothing stood out. How _boring_ , Dirk thought and wished they’d have customized garbage bags that had nice pictures of kittens on them or something.

Assistent sighed deeply, and started taking off his jacket reluctantly. Dirk felt a twinge of pity and found himself seized by sudden chivalry. What’s a better way to win over someone’s affections than to dive into a pile of garbage for them?

”I’ll do it,” he said nobly.

”What? But I lost,” Assistent said. Was that wonder in his eyes?

”It’s okay, I like trash,” Dirk said chipperly, and before either Todd or Assistent could say anything he had already climbed straight in.

It was like a ball pit, except worse.

”Okay, no I don’t,” he admitted, when his limbs slipped and he shrank into the sea of plastic and bad smells.

Todd handed him the Everbulb, which Dirk waved around in the dumpster, hoping that it’d start flickering like it had with Tina and therefore point him in the right direction. But it didn’t do anything unusual, so he resigned to his fate and started tearing open the bags to find it at random.

He was glad they’d decided to do this in the morning so the Everbulb wasn’t his only source of light. Farah had texted them late at night, saying Tina’s condition had been rather dangerous but they’d performed gastric lavage on her at the hospital. Dirk had had to google what gastric lavage was. It didn’t sound pleasant. There wasn’t much that they could do for her now except try to figure out why this had happened to her, so here Dirk was, shuffling through other people’s waste.

After about fifteen long minutes accompanied by the supportive cheers from Todd and Assistent, he finally found the chocolate box and held it up like a trophy.

”Now get me out,” he commanded after the box and the Everbulb had been taken from him.

He reached out with both of his hands and felt someone grabbing him at once and starting to pull him out. There was a bit of a struggle on both ends; whoever was pulling his hands was doing it badly, and Dirk wasn’t the most agile of beings. When he eventually did stumble out, he found himself holding both hands with Assistent.

Oh, how he wished he hadn’t just journeyed through waste. What was it with him, getting covered in bad smells and looking bad in front of Assistent? He looked at the small red scratch the cat had left above Assistent’s cheek and remembered he’d never had time to give Assistent that kiss he’d promised yesterday, either.

”Thanks,” he said quietly, reluctant to let go of Assistent’s hands – which were kind of cold but lovely to hold – but knowing he’d eventually have to, and seeing as Todd was already interested in inspecting the box and Dirk didn’t want to miss anything important, he gave Assistent’s hands a friendly little squeeze, smiled in a way that tried to be confident but probably looked creepy and then detached himself.

He turned his attention to Todd, who was squatting on the pavement and moving the Everbulb in slow circles around the box which he’d deposited on the ground. It still wasn’t doing anything.

”I dove through garbage for this?” Dirk complained.

”Well, it’s empty so I wouldn’t be so surprised that nothing’s happening,” Todd shrugged and turned the box around in his hands. ”Tina couldn’t remember where the shop was or what it was called, so at least this should tell us more.”

Dirk and Assistent bent down to look at it as well. Most of the cover of the box was taken up by that wildly colourful text that advertised how many chocolate flavors they had, and the actual name of the product, ”LOU’S”, was printed at the bottom of it, like it was an afterthought.

”Weird advertising,” Assistent said, noting it too.

”Sounds like an Italian restaurant,” Todd commented.

Luckily the back of the box provided an address for the shop, which turned out to be a couple of blocks away. They decided to visit it and see if the place looked shady, and perhaps buy a box and see if the Everbulb would reacted to the chocolates. It could very well be that they were wrong about the chocolate and Tina was actually infected with something else, but it was the only thing they could think of. And since the place was pretty close by, Dirk and Todd decided to head there straight away while Assistent stayed behind to watch over the agency.

  
”So,” Todd said when they were on their way. Somehow that simple word already sounded smug. ”Are you and Assistent like a thing?”

”Oh, you noticed,” Dirk said and grinned bashfully. ”Well, not yet. But fingers crossed?”

”Yeah, I thought you just liked annoying him but then noticed that maybe it was something else,” Todd said and nudged Dirk playfully in the ribs with his elbow.

”I mean, I still like annoying him. But now I also want to snog him,” Dirk explained, rubbing his side and nudging Todd back.

”Right, yeah,” Todd laughed, and then looked smug again. ”Shouldn’t you break the news to him that you already have a girlfriend before anything happens?”

”What?” Dirk said, horrified.

”That beast girl from Wendimoor?” Todd said.

”Oh no, please don’t remind me,” Dirk groaned, providing more laughter for Todd.

They walked on in silence for a moment, until Dirk had to ask a question that had sprang into his mind.

”Would you mind, though?” he said. ”If I dated Assistent, or something.”

”Why would I mind?” Todd asked, sounding confused.

”I don’t know,” Dirk shrugged, ”because we’re best friends and he’s still like a New Person in our lives. And he’s from Blackwing.”

”Dirk,” Todd said firmly, ”we’re adults. Of course you can, if you want to. And I think he’s pretty cool.”

”You do?” Dirk asked happily, bouncing enthusiastically while walking.

”Yeah,” Todd said. Then he nudged Dirk again, accidentally rather hard.

They practically ran the rest of the way to the shop because Dirk tried to get back at Todd but Todd kept dodging him. He probably wouldn’t have nudged him back that hard in revenge, though, since he’d said those nice things.

  
The shop, true to Tina’s words, looked indeed like a pop-up store, and it was so tiny that they would have missed it if it wasn’t for the alarmingly bright sign protruding from the wall which once again advertised their chocolate flavors.

”We get it. You have ’not three, not five, but fourty different flavors’,” Todd read out sarcastically. ”Do you think they chose such a stupid slogan so people would remember how annoying it is and never forget the store?”

”Who knows?” Dirk said and opened the door of the shop, which had a bell attached to it. It let out a pleasant ’ding’.

The shop looked a bit makeshift-y on the inside, like the space had been a lot of different things along the years and hadn’t been properly renovated to suit each purpose, and to compensate for it whoever owned the shop had plastered the walls with cheesy chocolate themed decorative prints. It looked like an office pretending to be a cute little bakery, but Dirk didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing. It smelled good in there.

It was one of those shops where you can’t avoid locking eyes with the cashier as soon as you walk in, and they were immediately greeted by a young woman who looked a bit scared. Maybe she was anxious to be a good customer servant. Dirk gave her a big, cheerful smile in sympathy.

They hadn’t actually planned what to do inside. They couldn’t just demand the girl at the counter to tell them why their friend threw up the night before, or why their magical lamp wasn’t working like it should. It was also such a small shop that it was hard to conspire privately, so they scurried to the furthest corner of the shop and hoped the girl at the counter didn’t hear everything.

Most of the space was taken up by shelves and display cases, so they decided to look at the chocolate boxes while they tried to think of what to do. They all had a very similar design to the one Tina had bought, but eventually they found one that looked identical.

”We should probably just buy one and open it at home?” Todd murmured.

Dirk nodded, and then looked at the price tags.

”$35,40? That’s a bit excessive,” Dirk noted.

It turned out all of the products were the same price, which Dirk thought was a bit odd, but he didn’t know anything about marketing or stuff like that. Maybe it was one of those ’if everything is the same price, nothing will look expensive’ mind tricks.

”Dude, all of these have peanuts in them,” Todd said, turning a couple of boxes over in his hands.

”Oh yes, we just love peanuts here at Lou’s!” the girl from the counter replied suddenly, making both Dirk and Todd nearly jump out of their skins. ”All fourty flavors have a bit of peanut in them. It’s our specialty. You can find it in not three, not five, but fourty flavors!”

”O-kay,” Todd said slowly, shooting a quick amused look at Dirk. Then he held up the same kind of box Tina had bought. ”Well, we’ll have this one.”

The cashier looked simultaneously excited and scared again, somehow, almost like the shop didn’t get a lot of customers so the cashiers didn’t know what to do when people actually bought stuff.

Dirk looked at Todd, but he hadn’t brought his wallet, so Dirk dug his credit card out from his jacket pocket reluctantly. Farah had finally made him get a proper credit card a few months ago. It had something to do with respectability and him being the head of a real agency and how he couldn’t just assume that he could holistically avoid dealing with his money situations forever, and blah blah blah.

”Oopsie-daisy!” the cashier said chipperly while drops of sweat dripped down her forehead. ”We’re having this funny bug with our credit card terminal today, I’m just going to do this manually. Can I see your ID for a sec for verification?”

Dirk went through his pockets again. Lint, a plastic bird toy, a half-eaten candybar, something sticky and unidentified, a note that Assistent had sribbled on and thrown away in the bin and which Dirk had taken out which totally wasn’t creepy of him, okay, he just happened to take it, a couple of coins and miraculously, his ID. He handed it over proudly.

The cashier took it and typed away on the computer for a while, which made Dirk grow bored so he looked around him in case he saw anything interesting. There was a back office the size of a toilet behind the cash register, but it looked normal, and more shelves and posters, ergo nothing particularly interesting.

”Do you have like a website or something?” Todd asked the cashier.

”What? Why?” she asked while she handed Dirk’s cards back.

”Uh, just curious about the flavors and stuff,” Todd replied awkwardly.

”No, we don’t,” the cashier said and shook her head firmly. ”Nope. But if you’re curious, you can always come back and buy _more_ chocolate and taste not-”

”Yeah, not four, not fifty, whatever-” Todd interrupted and dragged Dirk away once they’d received their purchase. ”Thanks, bye.”

While they left they could hear the cashier correcting Todd indignantly, going ”It’s ’not three, not five, but-” until the closed door of the shop cut her voice off.

”Jesus, her job seems almost worse than my job as a bellhop,” Todd said in disbelief, once they were a good way away from the shop. ”If I had to repeat phrases like that all day I’d probably die. I’d choke myself with that chocolate.”

”Do you really think there’s something up with this chocolate?” Dirk said, ignoring Todd’s morbid remark and focusing on their task. ”I so want to eat these.”

”Dude, no,” Todd said, in a tone that sounded like he was talking to a misbehaving child, which made Dirk snort because it made him imagine Todd as a babysitter who said ’dude’ to all the children.

”Fine, fine.”

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Back at the agency, they spent about an hour trying to crack the mystery of the chocolate. The Everbulb _still_ wasn’t reacting to it, even though the box was full and they’d turned it this way and that. Even smearing chocolate onto the light bulb directly didn’t do anything. They cut up some of the chocolate in pieces, stared at it, even sniffed it, and Dirk would absolutely have eaten some of it if Todd and Assistent hadn’t told him not to so firmly.

”Do you guys think that we might be completely on the wrong track?” Todd asked, when the three of them were basically having a staring contest with the chocolate which they’d placed under a light, hoping for it to start moving or something equally weird.

”What makes you say that?” Dirk joked in a casual tone.

”Yeah, this is nuts,” Assistent agreed with Todd, shaking his head and snapping himself out of staring at the chocolate.

” _Pea_ -nuts,” Dirk said, which made both Todd and Assistent groan, which in turn made Dirk grin.

In the end they decided to have lunch before Dirk would lose his self-restraint and just start munching on the suspicious-or-could-be-that-it’s-just-normal chocolate. They tried to go over recent events again, to see if they could come up with something that may have caused this to Tina that wasn’t chocolate, but they were coming up empty. Really, it should be Farah if anyone who could come up with anything since she spent the most time with Tina, but she hadn’t been able to think of anything else either.

At some point during the day Farah called them from the hospital, saying that Tina was now fine but was told to rest for a couple of nights there, and that the doctors had found her illness unusual – no wonder – and had taken some samples. They were analyzing the samples now and would probably be able to inform Farah and Tina more today, and since Tina was already bored of lying around the girls thought that they could come and hang out with them at the hospital to amuse her, but also so that they could find out firsthand what the samples would reveal.

”Tina says to bring everyone,” Farah said on the phone to Dirk.

”Everyone?” Dirk repeated, shooting a look at Assistent, who noticed and looked up with a quizzical frown. The word definitely implied more than just Dirk and Todd.

He glanced at the clock. It was nearing 4 PM and he wondered if Assistent would rather go home, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

”Hang on a sec,” he said to Farah and lowered the phone. He looked at Assistent again. ”Do you want to come see Tina in the hospital with us?” he asked him.

”Oh, uh,” Assistent uttered, visibly confused about the idea of being included in this visit. ”I… don’t have anything else to do today and… I am curious about the cause of her illness but- are you sure I’m not intruding?”

Dirk smiled brightly at him. This is a man whose job used to center around observing people who didn’t want to be observed, but now he’s unsure about tagging along when he’s welcome to do so. Dirk found it to be rather sweet, even though he was aware of how weird that comparison was. In any case, he did want Assistent to feel like he was allowed to hang out with all of them, even though he was ’just’ their assistant and came from morally dubious work backgrounds.

Dirk picked up the phone again.

”Assistent can come too, right?” he asked Farah, which made Assistent look embarrassed.

”Yep, Tina thinks he’s funny, bring him along,” Farah said in a voice that sounded sceptical and amused at the same time.

Dirk decided to skip repeating the details and gave Assistent a thumbs-up instead. He had an inkling that by ’funny’ Tina meant that Assistent was hilarious to look at because he behaved like an incredulous deer in headlights sometimes, probably most times that Tina had seen him, which meant that there was all the more reason for her to see more of Assistent so it wouldn’t be her only view of him.

Although Dirk did spend most of the bus ride to the hospital mentally comparing Assistent to a deer. He came to the conclusion that the comparison wasn’t _that_ far-fetched, actually.

  
Tina was propped up on the bed, supported by a pillow and carefully drinking a smoothie through a straw when they got there. She had a small room entirely to herself, and Farah was there, sitting on the chair next to the bed and holding the smoothie for Tina just in case she dropped it while she talked to her.

They both looked tired and slightly worried but somehow still weirdly excited and very happy, and although the sight of Tina lying on a hospital bed wasn’t new to Dirk because of the shooting incident some months ago, something about the scene felt different to him, like there’d been a significant shift of some sort.

He had difficulty wrapping his mind around it, but when Farah and Tina noticed they’d arrived and had greeted them happily and Todd started talking about the chocolate box, he realized that Farah was acting in a way he hadn’t seen before. She and Tina would look at each other every now and then, but Farah didn’t do that thing anymore where she quickly broke eye contact like there was something important that she’d suddenly remembered, and instead of her usual nervously calm expression her lips nudged up whenever she looked at Tina.

Dirk gasped out loud, which made everyone in the room look at him.

”Are you two finally…?” he asked quite loudly, actually pointing at Farah and Tina in his wonder and not daring to finish his sentence in case he was horribly wrong.

He was pretty sure he was right, though. He’d grown used to knowing what Farah and Tina’s pining expressions had looked like and had remembered them because he often wondered whether he did the same thing when he looked at Assistent.

”Together? Yeah,” Tina said and grinned widely. Her voice was hoarse – probably from having had a tube down her throat – and her teeth were red from the smoothie which made her look like a very happy vampire while Farah was blushing next to her.

”Oh? Awesome,” Todd laughed in surprise and went to high five Tina, who returned it feebly with her hospital tubed up hand.

Dirk was impressed. Apparently they’d somehow had time to confess their feelings to each other while this mess was happening to Tina.

”Yeah, there was just something romantic about throwing up profusely and having your stomach and bowels emptied while the light of your life is there wiping sweat from your forehead,” Tina explained as if knowing what Dirk was thinking of.

”There was, actually,” Farah agreed quietly while taking the now empty cup of smoothie away from Tina with a small smile.

It did make sense to Dirk too, even though it sounded a bit unusual. After all, if someone sticks with you and cares for you despite all that it probably does feel nice and promising. It reminded him of that time with Assistent and the slime, and it made him smile. He did his best not to turn around and glance at Assistent – who was standing awkwardly somewhere behind him – all hopefully, since that would probably be a bit too much and there was a time and a place for everything, after all.

He went to congratulate the new couple warmly, but Farah got flustered by all the attention they were now getting, and loudly but embarrassedly declared that she was now changing the subject because this was none of their business. She started gathering chairs for them to sit on while Tina laughed raspily at her. There were only two other chairs to be found near the room, however, and Farah didn’t dare steal a chair from another room. So, like a good host she sat down on the bed next to Tina who looked delighted about this turn of events.

Farah shot a glare at all of them as if daring them to say something annoying, but the glare wasn’t very effective since she looked so happy.

”I’m glad you brought your cute assistant,” Tina said to take the attention off Farah, and nodded to Assistent with a smile. He returned it awkwardly.

”How are you feeling, miss Te-, uh, Tina?” he asked politely, sitting straight in his chair.

”Oh, I’m alright now, and having my stomach pumped wasn’t exactly a new experience,” she joked sarcastically. ”A nice throwback.”

Dirk supposed that Tina had told Farah more about her past addictions than she’d told Dirk and Todd, because Farah gave her a serious look that said Tina shouldn’t joke about such a thing, and touched her hand with hers comfortingly.

Assistent nodded slowly, clearly not knowing how to reply to that, and instead asked them more about what had been going on since they’d arrived at the hospital yesterday, which spurred Farah on to recount everything.

Tina had become almost delirious with illness by the time they’d checked in and gotten Tina in care, but had started feeling notably better once her body had been emptied of everything and was now able to digest small amounts of fluid foods. Farah was allowed to stay there and keep Tina company while she rested.

Farah had asked the doctors if there’d been cases like this before, if it was some sort of epidemic, but there hadn’t and the doctors suspected it was some sort of poisoning, although they couldn’t make out what had caused it, hence the taking of the samples.

She then grilled Dirk and Todd on the details of the chocolate shop and tried to make them remember everything weird that happened in there, even though by now Dirk, Todd and Assistent were half-convinced they’d been completely on the wrong track with the whole thing.

”And then, umm…,” Dirk tried to remember the most boring tidbits as well, stuff that he hadn’t even bothered to tell Assistent earlier that day, because Farah was staring at him like she was interrogating him. ”Oh, yeah, the credit card thingy was broken or something but we were able to buy it anyway and-”

”Hey, the credit card thing was broken when I was there, too!” Tina interrupted. ”The cashier said they were getting it fixed, but I guess they didn’t because that was like a couple of weeks ago?”

”Yeah, yeah, but she managed to make it work by like looking at my ID and like typing something?” Dirk said

”Yeah, same,” Tina nodded.

”She did what?” Assistent piped in with a worried expression.

”I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention,” Dirk said sheepishly.

”No, I remember,” Tina said, looking into the distance and squinting. ”Yeah, she like wrote down some of the things on my ID to like verify my card with the computer?”

”Oh my God, guys!” Farah exclaimed in horror. ”Cashiers aren’t allowed to write down your personal information? They may look at your ID but it has your social security numbers and everything on them so they’re not allowed to write anything down?!”

Assistent nodded fervently in agreement next to Dirk.

”Oh,” Dirk said and looked at Tina, and they both shrugged.

”Tina! _You’re a debuty sheriff!_ ” Farah scolded her. ”You should know this.”

Tina spread out her hands and shrugged again, and then laid her head down on Farah’s shoulder.

”I was too excited to buy you presents to notice?” she suggested sweetly as an excuse.

Farah sighed and pressed a small kiss to her hair. ”Fine, you’re forgiven, I guess. And Dirk’s… Dirk. So.”

”What’s that supposed to mean?” Dirk asked quickly.

”You’re kinda dumb, Dirk,” Todd said helpfully.

”Hey!” Dirk objected with a pout.

But he wasn’t that offended, because he got a cute little sympathetic smile from Assistent in consolation.

They watched bad soap operas on the tiny hospital room’s TV for about an hour while Tina dozed on and off against Farah’s shoulder, who fretted over the chocolate shop’s shady practices. At some point Assistent seemed to get sick of the bad acting on TV and joined in on the conversation with Farah which had been one-sided so far. Dirk listened in with half an ear, not really getting all the technical talk, but he gathered that the two of them agreed that the chocolate shop people might be doing some kind of weird surveillance on customers, but had no idea what kind or why they’d do such a thing.

Finally a doctor breezed in the room and even though she looked a bit taken aback at the amount of visitors, she started talking about the samples anyway because she looked excited at their findings. It turned out that in addition to all the digested food and normal things to be found in a human body there had been some sort of plant matter, kind of similar to what you’d find in herbivorous animals except it wasn’t digesting properly.

”It looked like it was trying to _grow_ ,” the doctor added.

”I haven’t eaten any plants?” Tina mumbled confusedly.

”So the reason she was sick was because of the plant-like thing?” Farah asked the doctor, who nodded. ”There was no other poison or drugs that she could have eaten by accident?”

”Not that we know of, no” the doctor said. ”The… material was also slightly corrosive, which could also have accounted for the illness, but luckily it hasn’t done much damage to miss Tevetino. At least nothing that won’t heal itself now.”

The doctor took a small vial from her pocket and showed it to everyone. Inside, there was something light green and small which kinda looked like goo, or cooked spinach, and it had tiny tendrils pointing out of it.

”What the-?” Tina asked, looking understandably weirded out.

”Our expertise doesn’t stretch this far unfortunately, we don’t know what it is,” the doctor said apologetically, looking as confused about it as the rest of them were. ”It could be that you’ve eaten something that has rotten seeds in them? Maybe? In any case, you’ll be fine.”

”Well, I don’t get it,” Tina said after the doctor had gone. ”What about that wacko lamp thing?”

”Exactly,” Farah nodded, and then looked Dirk and Todd. ”I know you’ve already got a case, but if you can could you please try to look more into this while we’re in here?”

”Of course,” Dirk said. ”We should probably go, though, I don’t think we’ll find out anything more in here.”

Farah agreed and gave Todd her car keys and told them they could take her car since she was going to be in the hospital anyway. They decided to go back to the agency and see if anything new inspired them in light of the new information about Tina’s illness. Since it was well into evening now Todd asked Assistent if he wanted him to drop him off home, but Assistent said he wanted to stick around at least for a while in case they found out something important, which made Dirk feel a shameless sense of victory, because he realized he’d somehow managed to completely drag Assistent down into their weird rabbit hole of investigating unusual stuff.

  
The door to the agency was unlocked when they got there.

”Did we forget to lock the door?” Todd asked, but none of them thought they’d left it unlocked, or at least nobody admitted to it.

Assistent flicked on the lights and approached the desk, and he was just about to sit on his chair with Dirk following right behind him ready to hop on the desk, when suddenly a pencil that had so far rested innocently on the desk dropped down to the floor with a clatter and became Mona.

” _OH GOD_ ,” Assistent yelped in fright and jumped backwards right into Dirk, who stumbled and almost fell over from surprise but managed to catch a hold of himself and grabbed Assistent’s arms to balance him, but Assistent shook himself free of his hold and switched their stances so that he was hiding behind Dirk and gripping his arms instead.

” _Hiii_ , I didn’t mean to scare you,” Mona said in that slow and sweet voice of hers.

”She was supposed to- she?” Dirk heard Assistent squeak right in his ear behind him, and then Assistent sort of steered Dirk with his grip on his arms so that they were both looking in the direction of the houseplant that was still sitting in the same corner of the agency as before. ”She was supposed to be… that? Are there _two_ of her?!”

Dirk felt Assistent’s shaky breath against the back of his neck and tried not to enjoy it too obviously.

”Calm down,” Dirk said, except he really didn’t mind having Assistent hiding behind him and gripping him tightly.

”Oh, hi Mona,” Todd said casually. He’d only seen her about once or twice in her humanoid form before she’d settled in comfortably as an inanimate object in their agency, but he’d had time to get introduced to her and seemed to think she was pretty awesome. ”Did you get tired of your plant form? Why is the plant still there if you became a pen?”

”I wanted to be something else for a change, but I thought you liked the plant and would be sad if it was gone, so I found you an identical one from a shop,” Mona explained, and looked at Assistent curiously while smiling pleasantly.

”H-how long have you been a pencil?” Assistent asked shakily.

Mona just kept on smiling. ”Time. It doesn’t matter to me. Maybe a week, if you like?”

”Have I… written… _with_ you?” Assistent asked hesitantly, apparently having trouble trying to find the right words when it came to addressing Mona’s form.

”Yes, but I don’t mind it. I like spending time with you,” she said, and Dirk felt a sharp breath of disbelief against his neck.

Then her demeanor changed, as she seemed to remember something.

”I needed to tell you something. There was a man here when you were away,” she said, now all mysteriously and seriously.

”Like a client?” Todd asked.

”Nooo,” she said, shaking hear head with wide eyes. ”I think it was a bad man. He opened the door with something but it wasn’t a key, like you have.”

”What did he do?” Dirk asked, baffled.

”He was looking for something, like he’d lost something, but he was in a hurry. He looked at the chocolate box but didn’t take it.”

”Could it have been someone from the chocolate shop?” Assistent wondered, sounding a tiny bit less scared of Mona now that they were all captivated by her news. ”Farah and I agreed that if there really was something shady about that shop, then they’re probably tracking their customers down somehow?”

”Did he take anything, Mona?” Dirk asked.

”Only one thing. It was a small jar of slime,” she said. ”Then he left.”

Dirk frowned from confusion, and disentangled himself from Assistent – as much as he would have liked to stay entangled all evening – and backed up so that he could look at Todd and Assistent. They both looked equally as confused as him.

The jar of slime that they’d collected from that weird place where Derosa’s car had been dumped?

”Why would he take the slime-OH!” Dirk interrupted himself, yelling with the sudden glee of realization and snapping and pointing his fingers at Todd and Assistent frantically. ” _It’s connected!_ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOO SHIIIIIT!! next chapter will continue directly from this lil cliffhanger! it might be a while until I'll be able to finish and post it though because it will very probably be excessively long.
> 
> Btw I’m sorry for comparing Assistent with various animals he’s just so cute and small okay
> 
> also: I think the show never explained whether Mona can see when she’s an object? If the object doesn’t have ’eyes’? But… I kinda decided she can, so. maybe she can morph tiny eyes into whichever object she’s being at the time.
> 
> once again I'm a sucker for comments so if you liked it let me know! :D


	6. Back To The Old House

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEYYYY
> 
> THIS CHAPTER IS Really fucking LONG so buckle up. Like seriously. Jesus. it’s like 9000 words long how did this happen.

There was an eruption of noise, all of them talking at the same time while Mona stood there blinking, looking at them.

”What did he look like, Mona?”

”So the slime is his? He came to get back what we’d stolen from him?”

”-This makes no sense-”

”Yes it does, yes it does, oh my God, it does, or maybe it doesn’t, but the chocolate people are definitely evil!” Dirk yelled, jumping up and down.

”What did he look like?” Todd asked again.

They all turned to look at Mona, who straightened her back and looked so proud that Dirk could just about imagine a pair of spotlights being trained on her right now.

”Can you turn into a person, show us what he looked like?” Todd asked, though he didn’t really need to, judging by the ’it’s my time to shine’ expression on Mona’s face.

She nodded, and her body grew taller, and soon a completely different looking person was standing before them. She now looked like a tall, gangly man, maybe in his forties. The man had dark eyes and even darker circles under his eyes, shaggy long hair that was pulled back in a ponytail and a permanent-looking five o’clock shadow. Or maybe, with his haggard appearance, a four AM shadow. A shadow that’s marinated over time in the dark, not knowing what the clock even is anymore.

Even though Dirk knew it was Mona, it felt eerie seeing a stranger standing in their agency and knowing he’d been there earlier when they’d been at the hospital.

”Dude, why does he look familiar,” Todd said, surprising Dirk.

”Doesn’t look familiar to me?” Dirk said.

Todd was frowning hard. ”I feel like… I feel like something about him reminds me of Amanda.”

”I… _don’t_ … see the resemblance?” Dirk said, squinting.

”No, I mean like me and her have met him,” Todd said, and took out his phone to take a picture of him so he could send it to Amanda.

Mona stood patiently while he took a picture of him, and when he was done she started imitating him snooping around the agency, showing them what it had looked like. It made everyone uncomfortable, so Dirk asked her to stop, but he made sure to commend her on her excellent performance. She was pleased and curtseyed for them, and then, her job being done, morphed into a butterfly that flew back to the desk and then turned into a pocket calculator.

Assistent stared at the calculator warily.

”Now, don’t run away,” Dirk said to him.

”I’m not?” Assistent said defensively, but Dirk remembered the time he’d ran out when he’d first told him of Mona’s presence and raised an eyebrow.

”It’s okay, I’ll protect you. If you get scared, you can hold my hand,” Dirk said and wiggled his hand, being deliberately annoying.

”Man, shut up,” Assistent said with a roll of his eyes, but then he did something unfair. He glanced at Dirk quickly and brushed the back of his hand against Dirk’s slowly, dragging it downwards and turning his hand a little so that he almost grasped Dirk’s fingers, but then at the last second he drew his hand away and put it in his own jacket’s pocket, smiling slightly like he knew exactly what he was doing, and looking at the floor.

Bastard. Dirk couldn’t believe his luck.

The sudden sound of Todd’s phone ringing made him jump a little. It was Amanda, and Todd put the phone on speaker.

”Yeah, I know him!” Amanda said immediately after he’d picked up. ”Remember when I got that house in Kent and the guy who rented it needed my signature on paper, and you were there with me? Well that’s the guy who rented me that house.”

”Oh, right,” Todd said, now remembering. He nodded for a while, then blinked and frowned. ”So, he kind of broke into our agency?”

”What the fuck dude?” Amanda said. ”Are you sure?”

”Yeah… Dirk thinks it’s connected to our case.”

”Dirk _knows_ it’s connected to our case!” Dirk corrected him.

”Well anyway, what does your old house have to do with anything?” Todd wondered.

”I don’t even know what your case is,” Amanda said. ”But if he’s like an evil guy I’m not that surprised? I mean the reason I got such a cheap rent for that house was because there had been like some shady shit happening, I think, like the contract was kind of unofficial, I didn’t even get the landlord guy’s contact info.”

”What?” Todd said, horrified. ”Amanda! Why didn’t you say anything?”

”I assumed someone got like robbed there or something? You know like if there’s been a crime in a neighborhood so the real estate people have a harder time selling it so they sell it cheaper, that kind of thing? So I didn’t really give a shit because I just needed my own place,” she explained.

”Jesus christ,” Todd said. Then he thought of something. ”Hey, what was your house number again?”

”3540, why?”

”Fuck. I need to check something. I’ll call you later, okay?” Todd said. ”Take care, okay?”

”Uh, sure?” Amanda said, and Dirk could picture the confused frown on her face. ”Make sure to tell me whatever the fuck’s going on when you have the time.”

Dirk almost expected them to finish the call with ’fuck you, bye’s, since those two were the sort of people that swore even more than usual when they were talking together, but their goodbyes were the most normal part of the phone call.

”Okay, this is a weird coincidence, but… knowing our job it probably isn’t a coincidence at all,” Todd said, striding across the room and grabbing the chocolate box.

He held the chocolate box so that Dirk and Assistent could see the cover of it and the annoying flavor slogan with it.

”I _knew_ something about these numbers were familiar but I didn’t even realize to think of Amanda’s house because why would I? But…,” Todd said, and looked down at the cover.

”We have not three, not five, but fourty chocolate flavours…,” Dirk read out. ”Amanda’s old house’s number?”

”Right? This is fucked, right?” Todd said, eyes wide.

”Hey, you said everything in that shop cost the same amount of money?” Assistent said thoughtfully. ”How much was it?”

”$35,40, right?” Todd asked Dirk, who nodded so hard with excitement that his neck hurt a little.

”And… Amanda’s old landlord broke into our agency?” Dirk said, sorting his thoughts out loud. ”So… something’s up with that house?”

”And Amanda had been living in some weird freak’s house by accident,” Todd said uncomfortably.

”Wow,” Dirk said slowly, nodding again. ”There’s just something about you Brotzmans that attracts all kinds of trouble.”

”We’re holistic fuck-ups,” Todd joked grimly. Then he turned the box over in his hands again. ”Man, even the barcode has the number 3540 in it.”

”Maybe it’s like a subliminal message?” Assistent suggested. ”Like, hiding something in plain sight so you think of the number without realizing?”

”Oooh, yes!” Dirk said enthusiastically.

”But, why? Why would they want people to go there?” Todd asked. ”I’ve been to that house a lot of times and it’s normal?”

”I don’t know, but we should totally go there anyway,” Dirk said, rubbing his hands together. ”Like, right now.”

”Yeah,” Todd agreed, and went in search of the cool weapon they’d kept from the Wendimoor case right away before they’d forget to take it again.

”Uh, hold on, this isn’t very wise?” Assistent said warily. ”Shouldn’t we like, try to do some research or… something? Like we were supposed to? Instead of you running off at once?”

” _Michael_ , this is how this holistic stuff works, you know this,” Dirk said, trying to sound patient but failing at it. ”We’re _supposed to_ go to the house.”

”Fine,” he sighed with defeat. ”But. I’m coming with you. It could be dangerous and Farah’s not here.”

Dirk smiled brightly, feeling warm all over. ”Really? Are you sure? Like you said, it could be dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt or anything.”

”I don’t think anything can be worse than the knights with the massive scissors,” Assistent said with a shrug, but then he looked at Dirk solemnly and squeezed the very same hand of Dirk’s that he’d teased just a moment ago briefly, before letting go of it. ”Yeah, I’m sure.”

”Oh dear,” Dirk said out loud by accident, letting the words gush out in a breathless sigh, being as surprised as he was.

Assistent only smiled slightly and went to his desk to pick some stuff up from the drawers, putting them in his jacket’s pockets and patting himself down to see if he had his phone with him. Todd had found the weird air gun, and they all looked at each other to see if they were ready to go.

”Wait,” Assistent said, just when they were about to leave and Dirk was halfway through the door. ”The light bulb? Should we take the light bulb?”

”Oh, shit. Yeah,” Todd agreed with vigorous nods from Dirk, and so off they went in Farah’s car, armed with a lamp and a weapon that looked like a megaphone.

It was weird going to a place Dirk had been to before but which he’d never thought to be substantial case-wise, a thought which Todd also voiced from behind the wheel. It was a quiet, dark evening and there was not a lot of traffic about so it took them a bit less than an hour to drive there, during which they tried to come up with theories about why Amanda’s house was connected to this whole thing.

If it was a subliminal message, it looked like the chocolate shop people poisoned their customers on purpose and wanted them to think of Amanda’s old house when they bought their chocolates, but why? Why would anyone poison something as nice as chocolate? And Tina had never even been to Amanda’s old house?

In the end Dirk just shrugged, deciding to see if they found out anything new about the house before he’d accidentally come up with some wild theory about alien cats or something. He was aware that his case theories were sometimes… _slightly_ off topic. But only slightly. He was usually right. Right?

 

There were lights on in the windows of her old house when they pulled up front. They could just about make out the figures of a man and a woman, and some amount of children. It was hard to tell because they were running around so Dirk wasn’t sure if it was ten children or just two very fast ones.

”What do we do? Someone else lives there now,” Todd said. ”If we snoop around they’ll call the cops and we’re going to look so suspicious and weird with our toys.”

”Let’s tell them we’re LARPing if they catch us,” Dirk suggested.

”In someone’s private property?” Assistent asked sceptically.

”Right,” Dirk said disappointedly. ”We should LARP at some point, though, I’ve never done that and it sounds like a lot of fun.”

”Uh, anyway, I have an idea,” Assistent continued, shaking his head at Dirk amusedly. ”Just- follow me and don’t say anything.”

He got out of the car and started walking towards the front door, while Dirk and Todd scrambled after him, hiding the Everbulb and the air gun in their pockets as well as they could so they wouldn’t look like they’re from Scooby Doo or something.

”Oh man, I hope they don’t know anything about law enforcement,” he thought he heard Assistent mumble as he rung the doorbell. He did it briskly and stood there all purposefully, but from his stance next to him Dirk could see that he looked nervous.

”Yes?” the man who Dirk assumed was the father of the unknown number of children said gruffly when he opened the door. He looked tall and boring and he eyed them with suspicion. A woman, probably his wife, appeared behind him and peered over his shoulder.

Oh, great. How were they going to convince a territorial nuclear family that something weird was up with their house and they needed to take a look at it?

”Hello, we’re from the CIA and we have reason to believe that your house may have been occupied earlier by someone who’s currently under the government’s investigation, and we need to take a look at your premises,” Assistent said steadily and with such an authoritative tone that Dirk had to stop himself from goggling at him like an idiot in surprise.

He saw Assistent pull something out of his pocket, which was apparently what he’d taken with him from the agency. It was his CIA badge and his identification, and he handed them over for the man to look at. When the man was done inspecting them, he looked pointedly at Dirk and Todd, who were sort of just standing there like shy carol singers. He was probably wondering why they had no badges or anything. Also, neither of them had any chance of looking like they were secretly government agents.

Assistent noticed the problem.

”We’re doing undercover work. These two are my… trainees,” he paused for a moment. ”Assistants, if you will. This is part of their field training.”

_You little shit_ , Dirk thought, and accidentally let out a short, choked laugh. Somewhere behind him Todd aimed a hard kick at the back of his ankle, which unfortunately hit the target.

The man looked the two of them over quickly, shrugged minutely, and then looked doubtfully back at Assistent, probably thinking that he was the one he should be asking questions of.

”CIA though?” he asked, frowning and sounding a little offended. ”Why not… the police. Or FBI? I didn’t know that the CIA did home visits, and at this time of the day. Do you have a warrant?”

Dirk saw Assistent hesitate a little, but he recovered quickly, even though he looked uneasy.

”It’s-, The FBI _would_ have attained a warrant but since this is a matter of public and global safety we’ve been sent over as quickly as possible to have a brief look.”

The man was clearly taken aback. ”Public and global safety?”

Assistent made a show of glancing behind the man’s shoulder to see if the children were near, and bent closer.

”We’ve just received a clue that a- _terrorist_ may have lived here, although the threat could be empty,” he said in a hushed tone and made it sound like he was telling the man a secret between just the two of them.

He seemed to have said the magic word, since the man nodded slowly and seriously.

”I see,” he said conspiratorially. ”It’s good of you to keep us safe. Take a look around.”

”Thank you. Sorry for disrupting your evening, you just go on… continuing what you were doing, we’re going to be outside for a while before we check the interior of your house,” Assistent said pleasantly while giving a small, polite smile, but when the man had nodded again and gone back inside, closing the door behind him, the smile slipped off his face and he paled visibly.

”Oh, God,” he breathed out as soon as they’d backed off enough so that they were out of earshot.

”Michael, that was _so cool_!” Dirk said in excitement. _And kind of hot_ , he thought secretly.

”Oh man, I’m so going to jail because of this? That was so stupid,” Assistent whined, looking astonished with himself. His eyes were round and he was glancing back and forth at Dirk and Todd, like they were going to tell him that he had just dreamed that entire scene and actually hadn’t just done all that.

”How do you still have all that CIA or, Blackwing, stuff?” Todd asked in disbelief. ”Didn’t you need to turn them back in?”

”Shit went down at Blackwing so quick that no one really took notice of me,” he said, breathing deeply and trying to calm down, but he was speaking in that high, panicked voice of his. ”I don’t think Ken Adams even knew who I was? I mean obviously I can’t use any of this stuff anymore-,” he paused when he realized he’d literally just done that. ”- I mean, legally. I don’t have any Blackwing clearance, anything, so it’s useless, kind of like an expired credit card. But, since they... kind of forgot to ask for my stuff back I kept some of it?”

”It’s okay,” Dirk went to him and clasped his shoulder comfortingly. ”Farah does some illegal stuff too sometimes. Or stuff that’s sort of legal but not really, and the universe has so far been kind to us when it comes to getting in trouble with the law.”

Todd shot him a quick, sharp look that said ’no it definitely hasn’t’, but neither he or Dirk said anything to correct Dirk’s words since they didn’t want to remind Assistent of that fact and therefore worry him further.

”We could check out the yard now that we’re here, maybe hold the Everbulb and see if it starts reacting to anything?” Todd suggested which made Dirk look at him gratefully since it was a good distraction from Assistent’s moral crisis but it also sounded like a smart course of action. ”I mean I already know what’s in the yard. There’s this ratty tool shed or something and just a lot of grass, but maybe there’s something buried somewhere? Because I seriously doubt that there’s anything going on _inside_ the house, that makes no sense, I’ve been there so many times.”

”Why would there be anything buried? No, never mind, there’s almost always something buried. We don’t have a shovel, though,” Dirk pointed out, while still patting Assistent absently on the shoulder. He noticed what he was doing, dropped his hand now that he noticed he was looking a bit less panicked, and withdrew the Everbulb from somewhere in his jacket.

”Let’s check the tool shed, then,” Todd shrugged, and they started making their way around the house to the rather large backyard.

As they rounded the corner of the house and approached the ramshackle shed which was halfway covered by vines and looked like it was about to collapse from misuse, the Everbulb started flickering and steadily heating up in Dirk’s hand. He stretched out his hand which held the light in all directions, but it looked like the thing that was causing it to flicker wasn’t coming directly from any place in particular, until he aimed the Everbulb at his feet and the flickering strengthened. For a moment he feared there was something wrong with his feet, but then realized it was probably what Todd had suggested.

The door to the shed wasn’t locked, but before any of them could even properly get in and see if there were any shovels, the Everbulb became so hot that Dirk was sure it had burned his hand. He gasped in pain and had to drop it on the grass just outside the shed. It was even brighter than it had been when it had reacted to Tina.

”Are you okay?” Assistent asked at once.

He made some sort of high, vague noncommittal noise in reply, not wanting to make a huge fuss when they were just about to discover stuff, even though he felt the hand burning uncomfortably. He shook it in dismay, noticing that it was red, but tried to ignore it for now. It was his own fault for not realizing to wear a glove or something. He stepped inside the shed, grabbed an empty flowerpot from the floor of it and scooped the Everbulb in it so he could carry it without any pain.

There was a weird smell in the shed. He expected it to smell musty from the look of it, but there was another, more vivid smell which reminded Dirk strongly of something. Burnt car tire? Something disgusting. He was sure he was about to remember it any second now, but he had noticed something else now that the Everbulb was bright enough to illuminate every detail in the shed, something he probably wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. He squatted down. On the floor, near where he’d found the flowerpot, was the outlines of something flat and square-shaped.

”Todd?” he said slowly. ”Did you know there’s a trapdoor in your sister’s old house’s tool shed?”

”Uh, no?” he replied with alarm.

”Well, there is,” Dirk said, and started lifting it at once with his good hand. It was surprisingly light and easy to lift by himself, with just one hand. The weird smell wafted up stronger from the unknown basement as soon as he’d lifted the door up.

He glanced back up at Todd and Assistent, who were behind and above him, peering curiously down into the dark hole that the trapdoor revealed. The Everbulb flickered every now and then, creating an eerie effect of completely submering them all in darkness for the briefest of moments so that Dirk could barely make out Todd and Assistent’s faces, and before his eyes had time to adjust to the darkness the light was back on again and he had to blink again profusely to see.

”Shall we?” he asked, after all three of them had just stood there for a moment, trying to stare at each other or at anything in the annoying shifting of the light.

”After you,” Todd said.

”Are you sure we should-,” Assistent tried to say, but Dirk had already started descending the stairs and he could hear Todd following him as well, so the protestation was cut short. In a moment he could hear Assistent’s hesitant footsteps joining theirs.

The stairs went on for quite a while, but the air didn’t become chilly as Dirk would have expected. It was warm in there, and it smelled worse the lower they went. The stairs were surrounded by walls so that they couldn’t see where they were going, but after a while there was a greenish glow of light that was coming from somewhere close, probably a room. Dirk thought he could hear some sort of electronic buzzing and whirring as well. And… was that a bubbling noise?

”Dirk…,” he heard Assistent say. ”It smells like your hair in here?”

” _What?_ ” Todd asked in the middle of them.

”It does!” Dirk hissed. He would have yelled in surprise and satisfaction at knowing what the smell was, but it felt weird to talk loudly in a dim, weird basement when they didn’t know what was hiding behind the corner. ”When I got covered in slime? It smells like the slime! Except, a bit worse?”

”Ohhh,” Todd said in realization. ”Kinda makes sense, actually. Since the weird guy who owns this house stole that bit of slime we kept.”

”By the way, Michael, my hair doesn’t generally just smell like this, in case you thought so. You’re welcome to have a sniff again and see,” Dirk said, and hoped he wouldn’t get covered in that same stuff again tonight.

  
They finally reached the bottom of the staircase. There was an opening in the wall to the right of it, and it revealed quite a large rectangle-shaped room, maybe three times the size of their agency, but small enough to see all the weird things it contained all at first glance.

Most of the room was taken up by the thing that was in the middle of it. It looked like a pool, except it was full of greenish, yellowish slime, similar to what Dirk had been showered in, but a bit different. It was heaving and glowing like it was alive, and it was one of the things that was making the bubbling noise; the other was a large tank next to the pool which contained some sort of liquid, and it looked like it was connected to the pool by a tube.

The slime was providing most of the source of light in the room, but there were various screens on the walls that gave off a blue reflection as well, so even though there weren’t any actual lights it was rather easy to see. All along lining the edges of the room were even more scientific equipment than in the house they’d found Derosa’s car from, and some sort of machines surrounding the pool, so that most of the room was taken up by things. There was only about a meter and a half worth of empty space at most to walk around the pool in all sides, and as Dirk walked closer into the room he was afraid he’d stumble and fall headfirst into the pool, even though there were low railings surrounding it.

The Everbulb was rattling hard in its flowerpot, and suddenly, like it was a magnet, it flew out of the flowerpot and landed in the pool. It let out a loud crackle and sank into the slime with a little ’blub’ sort of noise.

” _Noooo_ , not our cool lamp!” Dirk lamented and ran in closer to look at it disappearing beneath the surface.

It looked like it exploded, because through all that viscous substance he could make out a sudden burst of light somewhere beneath, and then there was a mighty hiss that went on for a short while. Dirk sighed in sorrow and peered into the pool. The stuff in the pool really smelled awful, but it was oddly fascinating to look at, even though he was also angry at the sight because he remembered the sensation of having similar slime dripping down his neck.

Something in the pool caught his attention. The Everbulb exploding had caused a series of movements in the slimy stuff, which in turn had lifted something up to the surface.

”Is that a foot,” Dirk said blankly.

Todd and Assistent rushed next to him to look in the pool. There, floating in the slime was something definitely foot-shaped, although it looked so charred and corroded that it was disgusting to look at it directly for too long.

”Oh, ew,” Assistent said.

”Yup, that’s a foot,” Todd agreed, and the three of them simultaneously backed off as far as they could to the wall and turned their backs to it.

”Why is there a foot in the weird slime pool?” Assistent asked cautiously, breathing in with his eyes closed.

”I think there might be an entire person in there,” Todd said, and pointed to a bunch of stuff that had been left on the concrete floor near to where they were standing. Dirk saw that it was a pile of clothes and a pair of shoes, and that they had been haphazardly dropped there, like someone had stripped them off carelessly and… walked into the pool…?

”I don’t see why anyone would do that voluntarily,” Assistent said, toeing the clothes with his foot in disgust. The person who had gone in the pool had even taken their underwear off. ”But… it doesn’t look like someone dumped someone here just to kill them either, I mean, why would the victim need to be naked and why would the killer leave the victim’s clothes here?”

Dirk took one of the dead person’s shoes off the floor – it’s not like they would need it anymore – and threw it into the pool to see what would happen before either Todd or Assistent could protest. He went to the railing and watched it float on the thick sea of slime, just standing there while he thought hard and tried to connect everything. The shoe had caused a hissing noise similar to when the Everbulb landed in there, but nothing much else seemed to be happening to it. Dirk was tempted to dip his finger in there, but he was pretty sure what would happen so he decided not to.

He thought back to the day they’d gone to investigate Derosa’s house. His memory wasn’t that good – or, sometimes it was, but his mind tended to sift away some of the details that his attention span couldn’t handle -, but having gone over the case information with Assistent for his files helped him to remember some things. What was it that Derosa’s neighbour, Rachel, had said about him-?

_Oh_ , that was it! It all made sense now. Or, actually not everything. But-

”I have a theory,” he said finally with satisfaction in his voice, and turned around dramatically to face Todd and Assistent, who looked at him expectantly.

He took in a deep breath.

”So, the guy who broke into our agency owns this house and probably the chocolate shop too, what was it called, Lou’s? - and he sells chocolate that’s somehow poisoned with stuff that takes a while to become effective, like there’s something that reacts to your body so that it begins to grow, like those weird plant-like things that had started to grow in Tina? I don’t know, I’m bad at biology, but nevertheless, they become sick enough that at some point the disease takes over their body so that they’re essentially in a coma, and I’m willing to guess that Derosa was one of the unlucky ones to have bought a box of those chocolates – hence him not reacting to his neighbour and driving off like he was drugged and disappearing and his car ending up in the slime fridge house -, but the thing that’s growing inside them can maybe like, sense the slime here. Maybe it’s similar to what’s growing in them, I mean, the sample from Tina looked kinda slimy and green, _so_ , their bodies can sense there’s a massive pool of stuff somewhere that’s matching them, and, and-,” he snapped his fingers a couple of times in excitement, ”-the subliminal message, the chocolate shop advertising this house’s number is like extra directions for them in case they’re not sure where to go. It’s like, a traffic sign telling them ’Hello! Come on down here and join the slime!’.

He paused for breath but also to see if Todd and Assistent were following his theory. They looked thoughtful, but were nodding like it was making sense.

”That sounds batshit crazy, but I guess it could be true, considering all the other batshit stuff we’ve seen,” Todd said.

”But why does the chocolate guy want people in his weird pool?” Assistent asked.

”I’m not sure,” Dirk admitted.

Todd was glancing around at the screens. ”All this stuff here… it looks like a mad scientist’s chemistry lab, right? And the screens have stuff on them that looks like it’s measuring shit like the temperature of the slime pool and I don’t know… pH levels? Something about… chloroplasts? It looks like a project.”

Dirk was nodding vigorously. ”Maybe he’s growing something, like maybe he’s made a bit of slime at first but he needs human bodies that have been altered by the stuff in the chocolate to grow it? And to make it… perfect or whatever it is that he’s doing with this. Oh! The slime that fell on me, that was in the fridge? Maybe that was like prototype slime, and this is the real deal.”

”Shit,” Todd was nodding too, looking quite excited as well. ”And when they sell the chocolate they claim their credit card thing is broken so they can look up your name and shit so the Chocolate Slime Guy can stalk you and see where you live to see if the thing is working and if you’ve gone into the pool?”

”Yes, yes!” Dirk was yelling out of the unbeatable joy of connecting all the puzzle pieces. ”Tina’s address is in Bergsberg so she wouldn’t know she’s been stalked because she’s been here, and they know where _we_ live and the Slime Man probably knows someone’s onto him because we spilled his prototype slime all over the floor in that random house of his, so he’s probably keeping a tighter watch on everyone who buys something so that’s why he broke into our agency the minute we left for the hospital.”

”Oh my God, he knows where you live _and_ he knows we’re onto him?” Assistent said in wide-eyed worry.

”Yeah… shit,” Dirk agreed.

They stood there for a while pondering about the implications of that, and trying to evaluate how screwed they were, but Dirk’s mind was reeling with the case and was too impatient to worry too much.

”Well anyway,” he said, excited to get back to theorizing, ”for some reason the thing wasn’t working on Tina properly, right? Because she only got sick, but her mind was working completely, she never tried to come here.”

”How do you know if it wouldn’t have happened eventually?” Todd asked.

”Because it happened differently for her, didn’t Derosa’s coworkers say he’d seemed kind of ill for a while? But with her it happened almost all of a sudden, like it was going wrong. _And_ she had time to get so badly ill that she needed to go to the hospital, yeah? But the hospital hadn’t seen cases like her before, so that means nobody who’s eaten this chocolate checked themselves in, and so _that_ means that the weird hypnotizing coma effect would start before the victims have time to realize they’re in real trouble,” Dirk explained.

”Oh. Hey, Dirk,” Assistent said, oddly earnestly, like he was impressed. ”You’re not that dumb, you know. Todd doesn’t give you enough credit.”

Dirk smiled sunnily at him, feeling extremely proud of himself and liking the attention. Todd didn’t say anything, but Dirk could see him rolling his eyes at him good-naturedly.

”I think,” Dirk continued, being on a roll now, ”if the Chocolate Guy is growing something by using human bodies, maybe he needs all the organs to be like pure and really healthy or something so it can start growing the slimy plant stuff, but Tina’s an ex-addict and her liver and everything would only have just about now healed themselves, right?”

”Oh, yeah,” Todd said thoughtfully. He looked like he was taking this all in, and trying to sort it out in his head. ”So a string of victims just… walk up to this house and go in the secret basement and die there and nobody ever notices?”

”Could the Chocolate Guy sell the poisoned chocolates like… seasonally? To even it out?” Assistent suggested, to which they all nodded, thinking it probably possible. ”Still… I think I’d notice if someone just walked up my yard. _Or_ if the shed in my garden had a freaking trap door in it.”

”I know Amanda practically never left her house when she lived here, probably not even to look around her backyard. Because of Pararibulitis,” Todd pointed out. He looked uncomfortable. ”She was in danger all that time she lived here and didn’t even know about it.”

”I don’t think she was in any real danger, I mean it would be kind of suspicious and inconvenient to kill your tenants, wouldn’t it?” Dirk said in consolation, and then wondered what all this weird corrosive slime was for. He looked wildly around the room in hopes that it would provide some answers, but unfortunately he didn’t understand a thing about the readings on the screens or what all the different machines were doing. ”You know, if the guy wanted to make some slime he could have just done one of those instagram tutorials instead of doing all this and literally murdering people with chocolate.”

Something caught his attention while he was still looking around the room. There were so many different lights and buttons blinking around the room that he hadn’t noticed it before, but now he realized one of the lights was much higher, on a wall in one of the corners of the room. He looked at it for a while, waiting for his brain to tell him why he’d taken note of it. The light was red, and he squinted, thinking he could see a small object that it belonged to. There was a round lens pointing at him.

”Oh, we should leave,” he said, turning around and starting to usher Assistent and Todd out with him. ”There’s a security camera and I just stared straight at it.”

”Wait, wait,” Assistent protested as Dirk was nudging him forward with his hands on the back of his shoulders. ”We should take pictures with our phones, some kind of evidence?”

They were close to the stairs, but Dirk obliged and stopped, waiting for Assistent and watching him start to fumble his phone out of his pocket. As he did so, there was a slight clicking sound which Dirk wouldn’t have paid much attention to considering the various machinery noises around the room, but for some reason Assistent froze with his hand halfway to his pocket.

Being a bit taller than his friends who were in front of him, he didn’t have to crane his head much to see the new addition to the room. A slightly youngish, beefy looking guy had rounded the corner, having apparently descended the stairs so silently they hadn’t heard, and was pointing a very real looking gun at them.

”Back off, all of you,” the guy said gruffly, and motioned with his gun as a way to herd them further back into the room presumably so they wouldn’t be close to the only exit anymore. ”And keep your hands where I can see them.”

They backed off meekly like scared little sheep, each of them being so surprised at having been stopped so suddenly that none of them managed to say anything. Dirk tried to hold his hands up, but walking backwards in a room with a giant killer slime pool in it made it difficult not to flail his arms about to maintain some sort of balance in case his body decided to trip over.

The guy with the gun, when Dirk managed to glance at him, didn’t seem like a police officer. Could he be the owner of the slime pool? Or could he-

”Wait, what, Carlos?” the guy said suddenly, scrunching up his face confusedly like he’d remembered or recognized something.

Dirk glanced about, thinking someone new had entered the room, but it was just the three of them, and the guy was still facing them.

”Who the fuck is Carlos?” Todd said, anger and fear mixing together in his voice.

”You. Aren’t you?” the guy said, but he wasn’t pointing at Todd, he was pointing at Assistent.

”Oh, right,” Assistent said quietly. He sounded embarrassed for some reason, and if Dirk wasn’t mistaken he could see his ears go a little red.

There was a moment where all four of them just stood there, not knowing what to say, and then the moment passed in a rush when they collectively remembered where they were and that one of them was holding a gun.

”Well whatever,” the guy barked.

”I’ll… explain later,” Assistent muttered at the same time to Todd and Dirk, who were alternating between looking at him and at the gun-wielding man.

”I think this is kind of important, though? I mean, apparently you know a guy who’s currently pointing a gun at us?” Todd said indignantly.

” _Carlos_?” Dirk said loudly in disbelief, almost laughing out of surprise.

” _Okay, I went on a date with that guy once but that was ages ago and I didn’t know I’d ever see him again least of all in a situation like this now can we just-_ ,” Assistent said quickly and tensely, his voice rising in pitch.

”But ’Carlos’, though,” was all Dirk could say.

”Dirk, _shut the fuck up_ ,” Todd and Assistent hissed at him at the same time. Dirk was momentarily taken aback; it was scary seeing those two teaming up against him and talking in unison, but he supposed they had good reason to. After all, they were indeed in a bit of a dire situation. Still, he couldn’t completely stop wondering about what on earth was going on with the name ’Carlos’, and trying to process the fact that apparently Assistent had once gone out with that personality-less looking beef of a man.

”How did you find this place?” the man barked out angrily.

”U-uh, we ate some chocolate and… oh wow, hey, how did we end up here?” Dirk said in an attempt to pretend they were victims who had only just realized they were there instead of having come there to snoop around, but he was so bad at acting that everyone in the room cringed in embarrassment.

”Put the gun down, uh-,” Assistent said, sounding and looking like he was trying to recall the man’s name for a more effective persuasion, but it appeared he couldn’t remember it. Maybe it hadn’t been a good date. ”Please?” he said instead.

The man only gave him a glare, still pointing the gun at them, and then glanced at the screens on the walls. He looked even further enraged by what he saw.

”What have you done? The readings are all off? What did you put in there?” he half-yelled, gesturing with his other hand at the slime pool.

”There’s a person in there?” Dirk suggested hesitantly, knowing it was dangerous trying to be snarky when pointed a gun at, but not having the courage to say ’there’s a magic lamp and a shoe in there now’ in case it made the man even angrier. By now Dirk had a strong hunch they weren’t supposed to drop things in the pool that weren’t ’suitable’ to whatever it was that was growing there.

”The person is _supposed to_ be in there!” the man said frustratedly, then looked slightly regretful at having blurted such a murderous statement out, but compensated for his mistake by stepping closer to the three of them and lifting his gun-hand menacingly.

Dirk didn’t know what to say. He didn’t fancy getting shot at _again_ , and his head was buzzing around with questions about the nature of the slime and the case and he wasn’t sure if the man would agree to telling them anything.

”How do you know about Ingenhousz’ work?” the man demanded when none of them had replied to his questions about why they were there.

”Who? So this isn’t yours?” Assistent asked timidly but with some interest.

”Stop pretending like you don’t know anything!” The guy was practically seething by now. Dirk had a feeling this wasn’t the best time to explain that they generally knew very little and that various holistic things had led them here. But their silence had truly pissed the man off because he reached out, yanked Assistent close to him by the arm and pointed the gun at him now.

”Hey, whoa,” Dirk said, alarmed, but the guy shushed him and took out his own phone from his pocket and presumably started scrolling through the contacts, while Assistent just stood there looking pale.

Dirk didn’t know what to do. He thought they could maybe do something while the gun-man was distracted by his phone, but his mind wasn’t coming up with anything. The sight of someone who was important to him being threatened with a gun made him feel panicky, simultaneously rooted to the spot with a cold feeling, but also like he was going to explode from nervous energy. Luckily, before he had much time to fear the possibility that his holisticness would once again lead to someone else’s death, he could see Todd slowly and subtly inching the weird air gun out from his pocket, while holding his other hand up. While the room was half-lit by the glowing slime and the machines, it had dark, shadowy spots in it as well, and Todd was sort of standing in a vague spot like that, where his movements wouldn’t be so obviously noticeable.

”Boss? They did something to the matter,” the gun-man said to the phone now. ”I don’t know, the levels are all wrong. Yeah, three of them. Oh good, you are? Well, be quick. What do I do to them meanwhile? Kill ’em? Okay.”

Dirk really didn’t want to find out what the ’okay’ was for. He’d tried to gesture to Assistent with his head and his eyes that he should move away while the man had been talking, and Assistent had frowned at him in puzzlement, but now he noticed what Todd was holding.

”Hey? Dipshit?” Todd said loudly to the man and pointed the air gun right at him, which made the guy look at him in complete surprise – probably because the weapon looked like a child’s toy – and which provided Assistent enough time to leap out of the way.

The man pointed his gun at Todd now, but Todd was faster and had fired the air gun as soon as he was able to. The forceful blast of air threw the man in the air, making him fly backwards, and since they’d been rather close to the pool the backs of his legs hit the low railing surrounding it, and he… landed straight in the middle of the mass of slime, gun and all. Some of the slime spilled over from the force and splashed on some sort of thermometer-looking device, and it started crackling a little.

”Shit. _Oops_ ,” Todd said, eyes wide. He ran to the railing.

There was a gurgling sort of scream that went on for a while until the slime started hissing like it was burning, and then they couldn’t hear any noises from the man.

” _Ohh_ , I don’t recommend looking,” Todd said, disgust evident in his voice as he recoiled. ”He’s… melting already.”

”Like the leg?” Dirk asked, deciding he could survive without having a look and instead walking up to Assistent.

”Yeah, like the leg. The slime is turning into a weird color, though,” Todd said.

”I’m okay,” Assistent said to Dirk’s worried gaze. He looked a bit shaken, but gave Dirk a reassuring look, and then addressed Todd’s back: ”Thanks, Todd… for saving me and… basically committing manslaughter...”

”Sure, no problem. I mean, I didn’t mean to kill him, but this kind of stuff kinda happens to us now and then,” Todd replied, distracted by whatever he was seeing. Dirk could see some of Todd’s profile lit by the glowy reflection of the slime, and he looked like he really didn’t want to keep looking at the disintegrating man but couldn’t look away either.  
  
A sound started blaring from one of the monitors on the walls. It sounded like an alarm, and throughout the room Dirk could see lots of red lights blinking now, from various machines and instruments. The bubbling from the slime became louder too, and the tube that connected the pool to the tank beside it started sort of swelling.

”Oh, oh,” Todd said loudly over the din, ”the slime is definitely turning darker? And it’s… heaving?”

Dirk risked a look at the pool. The gun man had luckily sort of made a somersault when he landed in the pool so that his feet were sticking up and he didn’t need to see the man’s face melting off. He felt a bit sorry for the man, even though he’d probably have killed all of them. But he didn’t feel _too_ sorry; he probably hadn’t been a good person if he’d gone out on a date with someone as amazing as Assistent and then been okay with pointing a gun at him. And like Todd had said, unfortunately by now Dirk and Todd were rather used to seeing random bad guys dying gruesomely.

The slime was definitely heaving, it looked like it was boiling and started to spill over the pool as they looked at it so that they took a couple of cautionary steps back. Dirk was quite sure he could smell smoke, although he wasn’t so sure where it was coming from.

”Something tells me we may have ruined the slime experiment,” Dirk said.

”You think?” Assistent said, gesturing everywhere.

A big wave of thick slime splashed over the edge of the pool, almost reaching their feet and spreading in a lot of directions, and it touched the liquid that had started to leak from the tank which made the slime burst into flames. Some of the little machines that reached the floor were getting heavily affected by the slime as well, looking like they were about to explode.

In a completely wordless agreement, all three of them ran to the stairs as the flames started spreading and clambered the long way up, definitely hearing something shatter and explode behind them but not stopping to look.

They stumbled out to the musty shed and kept going until they reached the front yard of the house. Dirk’s mind was still buzzing with all the new information and what had happened in the basement, but the sudden breath of fresh air and the sight of the house made him remember where he was, and almost as if as a reminder that he existed his hand started hurting again.

”Let’s get out of here before that ’boss’ the guy was talking to comes after us,” Todd said, already taking quick steps towards Farah’s car.

”Uh, don’t you think we should tell the people who live here about the murderous slime psycho?” Assistent yelped.

”Right,” Dirk said, having also almost forgotten that they had some responsibilities and couldn’t just run around causing mayhem without warning bystanders.

The explanation was rather chaotic, all three of them simultaneously trying to explain what had happened in a considerably watered down way so as not to freak the family out too much, but still trying to make very sure that they should definitely leave the premises and call the police. It was safe to say that their performance of trying to act like they were from the CIA while they talked wouldn’t earn them any kind of academy awards.

In the end they ended up saying there was a secret, dangerous basement in their house, that it was now probably collapsing so they definitely shouldn’t go in there, and that it might all be the work of a terrorist, but they’d have to investigate it more.

”So, it’s very classified, you see? When you call the police you can’t tell them about our visit because you know. Protocol. And we can’t let the information spread out. You’re in on a very important secret,” Assistent said to the man of the house as they were leaving. He looked nervous, probably from basically committing treason or breaking the honor code of the CIA or whatever.

However, it didn’t look like Assistent was in great danger of being arrested, since the man said ”Yes, Sir!” all stiffly while giving a salute, like he was doing his patriotic duty to the country.

”Do you have anywhere to go while the danger passes?” Assistent asked.

”Oh, sure, we move around a lot for my job anyway so we’re rarely here anyway,” the man assured, which made Dirk suspect that maybe the killer-landlord only rented the house for people he knew would least likely notice anything going on in the basement.

”What an idiot,” Todd muttered as they piled into the car, with Assistent ending up driving as he was the first one to have slammed himself in. It seemed that he wanted to get away from the family as fast as possible.

”You’re not going to get arrested,” Dirk assured him perkily with a pat on his shoulder.

”Well now you’ve jinxed it,” Assistent said tensely, but then shot a hopeful look at Dirk, like it had occurred to him that maybe Dirk’s holisticness would protect him after all. It scared Dirk a little; he didn’t like feeling responsible for other people’s fates. But he gave him a wide, reassuring smile anyway.

As they drove off they realized it wasn’t safe to go back to the agency, but needing some place to go Assistent suggested they stay at his place until they figure out what to do. The idea seemed the smartest at the moment, since they couldn’t just crash at Tina’s hospital room and they needed to lay low for a moment.

Assistent’s apartment building, though not situated in the very heart of the city, was at a residential area that was still bustling with cars and people even though the hour was late. It looked like a modest, yet respectable and clean kind of place, suited for someone like him.

But just as Assistent was getting ready to park the car - and Dirk, in spite of trying to think of the case only, got fairly excited about the idea of seeing where his cute assistant lived - Todd said he was pretty sure someone was following them, and might have been for a while but it was hard to tell in the busy traffic.

They became pretty _very_ sure when Assistent doubled back and drove off frantically in another direction and saw the car behind them rapidly change its direction too.

”Great. Great. This is just great,” Assistent said through gritted teeth, the pitch of his voice somehow managing to rise on each word. He swore under his breath and kept driving in a random direction while the car followed them insistently.

”I’m calling Farah,” Dirk announced, phone already in hand.

There seemed to be some sort of road work going on in because the traffic was getting slightly congested, and every time they had to stop at lights they felt like sardines in a very dangerous jar. Assistent was too uptight to break traffic rules – which was slightly ironic to Dirk considering the rules he’d broken earlier, but he didn’t want to say anything about it when the poor man looked so stressed out already – but their follower didn’t seem to have any qualms about it and was gaining on them.

”Farah! How do you get rid of a car that’s kinda chasing you?” Dirk asked as soon as she picked up and was on speaker.

” _What?_ What the hell are you doing?” she exclaimed on the other end.

”Stuff,” Dirk said vaguely.

”Right, whatever-,” she said, apparently understanding they were in a hurry, ”get somewhere spacious enough where you can swerve and turn a lot, but don’t go off anywhere too deserted because they might decide to start shooting once there aren’t people around-”

”Fuck,” Assistent said, but bravely and resolutely took a turn away from the worst traffic and started speeding down a street that lead to many side alleys.

”-and if you have any kind of weapon to distract them that would help, and make sure you’ve shaken them off before you hide,” Farah concluded.

”Hey, we do have a weapon!” Todd pointed out and waved the fatal air gun around.  


 

”Oh man, I hate this, I _haate thiis,”_ Assistent yelled after a while of pulling very impressive Farah-worthy moves around corners, revving up the engine and steering the car with stiff arms.

Dirk had given up on talking to Farah so he could try to offer words of encouragement to their amazing driver. It made him feel like a bizarre cheerleader, but one had to pull one’s weight after all.

”Hey, I think now would be a good moment,” Todd said, peeking out of his window. He hadn’t wanted to aim the gun at the car directly since it would probably have blown up or something, and one manslaughter per day was quite enough. But now they were passing a cluster of big garbage cans waiting to be emptied without any passer-bys in the way, so he shot at them and at a streetlamp too for good measure.

The cans flew all over the road, one of them crashing into their chaser’s windscreen with a loud bang, while the streetlamp creaked and fell over, landing over the back of the car and halting its movement.

”Nice,” Assistent said, barely risking a glance because he wanted to keep driving as far as possible. ”Now where do I go?”

”Can we take a complicated route back to your place?” Dirk asked.

”They practically saw me park, as if they wouldn’t come look for us there again,” Assistent said miserably.

Dirk was trying to think of places to go. Obviously they needed to crash somewhere, it was the middle of the night and Dirk probably had at least a first degree burn on his hand and he didn’t want Assistent to collapse from anxiety. Definitely somewhere safe and quiet. But who’d take them in?

”We only have like one friend who lives here and it’s Farah and she’s our roommate,” Todd sighed.

It didn’t really need to be a _friend,_ did it? Just somewhere they’d be welcome. Maybe. Hopefully.

”I have an idea,” Dirk said.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y’all… writing dirk gently plot is so weird…… Is this how max landis feels like… douglas adams how… (also I have no idea where amanda lived I just picked a place off the map and it was kent. But the house number is actually hers! It was shown in s1 episode 1 or 2 idk)
> 
> Hope you liked it and are still interested! Sorry for the small cliffhanger and all the Extra action, next chapter will be calmer!
> 
> Anyway I’m gonna slip into something more comfortable now, like a coma.


	7. Sleepover

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry it's been so long!! I hope you'll like this update!

”I know this isn’t the best time, but you said we have to come back for cake some day. So we picked today. Literally almost a day after your invitation, but we were ever so excited about the idea of that cake,” Dirk said as soon as the door opened.

”In the middle of the night?” the old lady said, befuddled. She was in her night dress with a bathrobe over it and had slippers on her feet, looking so cozy that Dirk immediately felt guilty about interrupting her night.

”Yes, not the best time,” Dirk replied with many nods as if she had just come up with a good point that hadn’t occurred to him and he was now agreeing with it. He smiled brightly for good measure.

”What we mean to say is we’re sorry and you absolutely don’t have to let us in,” Assistent corrected.

”I’m Todd and I’m also sorry,” Todd added. ”Also, this was Dirk’s idea.”

”Well, well. If it doesn’t look like you’re in some kind of trouble… what’s happened to your hand, young man?” she said, noticing Dirk’s reddened hand.

”Light bulb accident,” Dirk said, happy that he actually wasn’t lying to this sweet old lady by saying this. ”And we are indeed in a bit of a pickle. _Not_ from changing light bulbs though, this isn’t one of those ’how many private detectives do you need to change a light bulb’ situations… but we’d appreciate it if we could just stay here for the night?”

She barely hesitated.

”Oh, fine. You seem respectable enough and I couldn’t sleep anyway, and it really has been too long since I’ve had guests,” she said and let them in. She already started directing them towards the kitchen - it seemed she did actually have a quantity of cake ready even at this hour – while mumbling about trying to find some aloe vera cream for Dirk’s hand.

Her instant hospitality took them by surprise, but they went in gratefully. It occurred to Dirk that this _could_ be a fatal, cautionary gingerbread house tale -type of entrance, but it didn’t feel like it at all to him. Not that he was the best judge at these things considering how gullible he tended to be, but still. To him she just seemed like a nice person who wasn’t fazed by a little weirdness, and who held rescuers of her cat in high esteem.

Her house wasn’t big, but it looked very nice and polished. They hadn’t gotten a good look at it when they returned her cat since they hadn’t gone further than the door then, but now Dirk could see the interior looked like the combination of a library and a typical granny’s house. There were loads of books and folders and even a couple of computers, but also complicated looking knitting projects and cat themed decorations.

”Hey Mendel!” Dirk said cheerfully when her cat, the little fiend they’d been chasing not that long ago brushed against his legs. He saw Assistent take a sidestep; the scratch had apparently made him cautious.

”Seriously, thank you, umm… Mrs…?” Todd said when she’d sat them down in the kitchen. He shot a look at Dirk, expecting Dirk to provide him with her name, but Dirk was embarrassed to realize he only knew her cat’s name.

”It’s just Maggie, dears,” she said.

This lead to awkward, hasty but proper introductions all around, while Assistent asked if it really was okay of them to crash at her house, to which she said her sense of intuition about people had gotten better as she’d gotten older so she was sure they were nice young men and besides, Todd reminded her of her nephew who she hadn’t seen in ages and it got quite boring sometimes with just her and Mendel.

The cake was a spicy carrot cake. It was delicious, and Dirk got some cream and a cold compress for his hand, so he felt quite content. They sat there in the quiet kitchen eating, and Maggie seemed to take their silence as a sign that they wanted to talk about something that wasn’t for her ears so she bustled away to find bedsheets for them. But in truth they all felt too tired and confused about the day’s events to bother talking. It was almost as if they’d telepathically decided to postpone all official case planning until the next morning.

”Well, I have an easy chair in my bedroom where one of you can sleep, and there’s a pull-out sofa for two in the living room. But that’s all, I’m afraid,” Maggie said when she returned.

”Dibs on Assistent!” Dirk announced, rousing himself from his quiet reverie with his hand up in the air.

Assistent choked on his cake a little and coughed profusely.

”I mean, on the sofa. Dibs on the sofa. But we can share, if you want?” Dirk said quickly, looking furtively at Assistent and hoping he hadn’t been too forward. But it looked like Assistent was laughing, although it was a bit hard to tell when he was coughing at the same time.

”Yeah, we can share,” he mumbled eventually, smiling around his piece of cake.

Dirk grinned and ignored the look Todd gave him.

 

 

Once Dirk had stripped down to his undershirt and boxers and was able to burrow into the blanket like a tired burrito he felt magnificently comfortable. It felt good to be somewhere that wasn’t an oppressively stifling slime basement and being able to stretch out his leg, which, even though the old bullet wound rarely bothered him anymore, sometimes felt sore if he’d been walking a lot many days in a row without proper rest.

But even though his body was all relaxed, he felt considerably less sleepy now that he was on his own with Assistent, facing each other on the bed in the dark. He felt all giddy just from looking at him. Assistent had borrowed a grey T-shirt that had been left over by Maggie’s nephew, and seeing him in it and lying down with him felt so delightfully domestic.

”You were great today. Very brave of you to lie about the CIA, and then in the car, you were really cool,” Dirk said reverently. The living room was far enough away from Maggie’s bedroom that they didn’t need to fear being overheard, so Dirk was ready to take this opportunity to shower Assistent with as many compliments as he wanted.

”Thanks,” Assistent said and shrugged, but not dismissively; rather like he acknowledged Dirk’s compliments and didn’t deny them but also didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.

”And you know… you got pointed at with a gun,” Dirk said apologetically now. ”Was this day a bit too much?”

Assistent exhaled, blowing out his cheeks a little. A strand of his hair that had fallen on his forehead lifted up a little from the force of it.

”Well, kinda. I’m not good with stress, as you’ve probably noticed,” he said with a small laugh. ”So maybe when the next case comes I’ll focus on desk duties. Although I am glad I didn’t leave you in danger, that would probably have stressed me out even more.”

Dirk smiled and poked Assistent’s shin with his toe.

”So you’ll stay at this job, even after that?” he asked softly.

”Uh, yeah?” Assistent said without hesitation. ”And besides, you’re forgetting I _did_ get trained as a CIA agent. So even though that gun-situation wasn’t so great… not great at all… I can, you know, handle it.”

Dirk stared at him until he was sure Assistent wasn’t lying. He didn’t want him to say he was fine just because he liked his job at the agency, and then later feel awful about it. But he looked truthful enough.

”How do _you_ deal with it? You’ve actually gotten shot,” Assistent said when Dirk hadn’t said anything.

”I don’t, really,” Dirk realized. ”It _sucks_ , especially that time I got shot at with a crossbow _twice_. But I guess it’s just a part of all this.”

”Well, exactly,” Assistent agreed, and they shared a little disbelieving laugh.

Something occurred to Dirk when he thought back to their day.

”Okay, but what was that stuff with ’Carlos’, though?” he said, changing his tone into his usual ’annoyingly but fondly teasing Assistent’ tone.

Assistent looked embarrassed.

”Right. So, when I knew I’d be becoming a part of the CIA I had this idea that I’d be doing something really important and secretive and cool, and that I’d have to be like, discreet, and stuff, when it came to other people. So when that guy asked me out when my training was about to start I kind of panicked and gave one of my middle names. Which, honestly, is really embarrassing but yeah. And besides he was kinda douchey, so all the more reason not to tell him much about myself,” he explained.

”Douchey?” Dirk snorted. ”Well that’s an understatement.”

”Yeah… poor man, though,” Assistent said, grimacing a little when he evidently thought about the slime pool. ”Not the best way to go.”

”Hmh,” Dirk mumbled in agreement, but not wanting to think much more about the man. ”So your full name is Michael Carlos Assistent?”

”Marvin,” Assistent said.

”What?”

”Michael Carlos Marvin Assistent,” he said.

Dirk felt such a wide smile creep on his face that his cheeks hurt a little. Why did he find everything about his assistant so endearing?

”’Marvin’? I love that,” he said, still grinning. ”I’m so going to call you Marv all the time. Please tell me you don’t hate that nickname.”

Assistent rolled his eyes and huffed out an incredulous little laugh. ”What’s so funny about it?” he asked.

”It’s not funny, it’s _cute_ ,” Dirk emphasized. Then his grin turned into a rather coy smile when he decided to say his thoughts out loud. ” _You’re_ cute.”

Even though it was quite dark in the living room, Dirk thought he could see a bit of colour rising on Assistent’s cheeks. The corners of his mouth turned up hesitantly.

”Um. Thanks,” he said.

By now Dirk had formed a theory that Assistent reacted to most things around him with varying levels of confusion. He felt like a person who was often surprised by whatever was happening to him, and even if he was primarily showing some clear emotion such as annoyance or amusement, it was almost without exception peppered with befuddlement.

This very impression of him right here looked like happy and hopeful confusion, if Dirk was deciphering him right. His judgement _could_ be clouded with optimism of course, but he was still pretty sure he was reading the situation right. After all they were lying face to face, not very far apart from each other and had been throwing almost obnoxiously obvious flirting back and forth for a while. Dirk’s heart skipped a little when he added Assistent touching his hand earlier that day to the list.

Dirk eyed the scratch the cat had made on Assistent’s face the day before. He raised his hand from under the blanket and softly touched it with his forefinger. It was high on his cheekbone and still very red.

”Forgot about that didn’t you?” Assistent murmured, looking at Dirk intently with those deep brown eyes of his.

”No, no,” Dirk assured cheerfully. He fulfilled his promise and placed a kiss on it, happy to finally do it.

Assistent did a sort of bashful retreat into his blanket when Dirk withdrew, smiling by pursing his lips a little, as if trying to contain his reaction but doing a bad job of it. It was almost too cute to bear.

”Any better?” Dirk asked, brushing the scratch again with his finger.

”Oh, I couldn’t really care less if it hurt or not,” Assistent admitted, definitely eyeing the lower portion of Dirk’s face.

”Okay, so, that’s an invitation for me to actually kiss you, right? Right?” Dirk asked, squinting. He really didn’t want to botch this up and he was quite bad with euphemisms and signs. Better to just ask and be done with it so they were on the same page.

”Yes, well deduced,” Assistent said to Dirk’s delight, and made it easier for Dirk by scooting closer to him so that he was all up in his face, and from there all Dirk needed to do was to bridge the gap between their lips, and that was that.

Such a relatively simple, easy thing to do, except it wasn’t simple at all; it made Dirk feel all glowy and warm inside, and he was extremely aware of every point of contact between him and Assistent. _God, finally_ , his entire body seemed to be singing to him.

”Oh, that was fun,” he said breathily after a couple of tentative little kisses. ”And nice. And cool,” he added earnestly.

”’Fun and nice and cool’?” Assistent repeated, huffing out a laugh which Dirk felt on his face.

”And good!” Dirk nodded. ”Can we do it again so I can think of more adjectives?”

Assistent looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to roll his eyes or look at Dirk fondly, but Dirk got the overall message anyway. There was a moment’s pause when they just stared at each other, eager for some more kissing, but neither moving until suddenly by some simultaneous instinct they met in the middle so fast their teeth clashed together. They shared a little laugh, but once they remembered what they actually wanted to be doing it turned into some good snogging.

Dirk couldn’t think of any more adjectives, at least nothing that would do the sensation any justice when said out loud. It had been so long since he’d had this with anybody, and his past experiences and random desperate hook ups back in England had been so lackluster and devoid of proper intimacy, mutual fondness or any feelings at all, really, that he almost trembled from feeling so content and good. He just wanted to bask in this feeling forever, knowing he was wanted and wanting someone in turn. And the someone being as adorable, lovely and ridiculous as his own assistant!

They were kind of clumsy, trying to figure out how their lips fit together and getting used to this new territory of their friendship – or whatever it was. Both simultaneously slightly shy but definitely eager, they probably looked like two inexperienced teens instead of thirty-somethings, but neither of them minded.

  
”You know, Dirk,” Assistent whispered a bit later, when they’d realized they were in an old lady’s house and probably should stop snogging and had settled down to try to sleep. ”You’re a bit confusing to me. Your life – it’s so weird. So many things happen around you, and you’re-,” he gestured vaguely at Dirk to perhaps indicate his somewhat chaotic nature, ”you know. You. But I like it, a lot. Just so you know. Even if I’m a bit overwhelmed sometimes.”

Then he wrapped himself into his blanket, all the action and stress of the day apparently catching up to him because he fell almost instantly asleep after speaking, right there next to Dirk.

 

* * *

 

The next morning the three of them gathered in the kitchen to try to figure out their plan while Maggie served them pancakes and coffee. Even though they’d just ruined a murderous guy’s slime basement the previous night, it was hard for Dirk to feel scared when he was having delicious breakfast after a _great_ sleepover. His burnt hand felt better by now, too.

”Well, we could tell the police about the shop?” Assistent suggested while neatly spreading jam on his pancake and discreetly playing footsie with Dirk under the table.

”That’s an idea,” Dirk nodded, his mouth full.

”What would we even tell them?” Todd asked sceptically. ”That they sell evil chocolate?”

”Oh, true,” Dirk agreed. ”Bad idea.”

Assistent kicked him softly.

”And we can’t just straight up try to kill him or anything. He’s probably a real person and not, like, an alien or something. Like we can’t just commit murder,” Todd said thoughtfully.

”Why would him being an alien make it okay to kill him?” Assistent challenged, but he didn’t sound very serious because he’d resumed the footsie with Dirk and his tone was light.

”Nerd,” Dirk said fondly.

”Jesus,” Todd muttered, rolling his eyes at them.

They hadn’t exactly announced the fact that they’d snogged last night to Todd – even though Dirk had kind of wanted to – but Dirk had looked so smug that Todd had taken one look at him that morning and probably guessed most of it.

”Well,” Assistent said, noticing Todd’s reaction and trying to advance the conversation, ”it would be easier to plan what to do if we knew more about him, obviously. What do we know so far?”

Todd took out his phone to look at the picture of Mona when she’d transformed into Amanda’s evil landlord.

”Oh please, you’re driving a lady nuts trying to figure out what it is you’re talking about,” Maggie intercepted suddenly, joining them at the table with her own pancake. Dirk felt Assistent’s foot sliding off his leg quickly, as if embarrassed about canoodling Dirk in her house while she was right next to them. Dirk was pretty sure Maggie was cool enough not to care, but he didn’t bring it up.

Maggie was looking at them expectantly and they all looked back at her, unsure what to say.

”Detective stuff,” Dirk replied mysteriously. But then he realized that since she’d let them sleep in her house it wouldn’t be fair to her to keep her in the dark. He shrugged. ”We’ve pissed off this man who had a pool full of killer slime. Some kind of scientist?”

"'Killer slime'?" she asked, and when Dirk hesitated, she said: "I'm not made of glass, do tell me."

He gave her the outlines of what had happened, explaining the victim-lurings and bodies but leaving out the most grisly details anyway.

”Fuck, what was it that those screens of his said?” Todd pondered, then shot an apologetic look at Maggie for swearing, but Maggie just waved her hand. ”They had something to do with chloroplasts or something. I think.”

”Oh?” Maggie said, clearly even more interested now. ”Surely you boys remember enough from your high school education to know that they’re very important in photosynthesis? I’m a biologist myself.”

”Really?” Dirk said, baffled. And no, he didn’t remember anything as specific as that about photosynthesis, except that it had something to do with light and oxygen and plants.

”Well, retired now,” Maggie nodded. ”But I taught biology and genetics, at California Berkeley.”

The three of them shared an impressed look. She really _was_ a cool old lady.

”Would you happen to know of a guy called… what did that gun-guy say to us in the basement? ’Ingenhouse’ or something?” Todd asked.

”My dears, I know of _the_ Ingenhousz. H-O-U-S-Z,” she spelled it for them. ”Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch biologist from the 18th century who made a significant contribution to the discovery of how photosynthesis works.”

”Okay… is our villain guy some angry time travelling Dutch guy who _really_ likes plants?” Dirk wondered out loud. He didn’t fancy having to face yet another time traveller. They were always such stubborn people.

”It’s most likely a code name, though?” Assistent pointed out. ”I mean, there were lots of dumb ones in… well, you know where,” he finished lamely, apparently unwilling to talk about Blackwing to a half-stranger. Maggie took no notice of his mysteriousness.

”Yes, not a very stylish code name that one, I think, but we scientists do tend to name things after our heroes. Take my cat, for example. I named him after Gregor Mendel,” she said, chuckling a litte.

”Oh,” Dirk said. He didn’t know who Gregor Mendel was either, but now it made sense why the cat wasn’t called Mr Whiskers or something more normal like that. ”So we’re against a regular villain but he’s still a guy who really likes plants?”

”You probably don’t know who this is?” Todd said with a shrug but showed Maggie the picture anyway.

She took a good look at it, frowning for a while. It seemed as if she saw something familiar there, and after a while her face settled into heavy disappointment, the feautures of her face sort of slumping a little.

”Oh… but I do, actually,” she sighed. ”Lou… probably should have known,” she mumbled vaguely.

Todd and Assistent looked surprised, but Dirk sat back in his chair with satisfaction. Everything _is_ connected. He rarely doubted the connectedness of all things himself, but when everyone around him was sceptical of it, it felt very good to see it proven true once again. They were _supposed to_ find the cat’s owner. The cat’s bloody owner knew about their killer guy! He looked at Assistent with an ’I told you so’ expression, but Assistent was too busy paying attention to Maggie and missed it.

”Lou? This guy’s name is Lou? Are you kidding me, he named his killer chocolate line after his own real name?” Todd exclaimed, as if that was the most important part of the news. Although Dirk agreed. Their villain was _really_ bad with names.

”How do you know him?” Assistent prompted, focused on the important things.

Maggie sighed again and put Todd’s phone away from her sight. She looked instantly reminiscent.

”His real name is Lou Horton, and he was one of my brightest students about twenty years ago. He came from poor backgrounds, but he was so brilliant that he’d gotten there with a full scholarship, and I was so impressed by him and fascinated by the way he worked that I, in a way, took him under my wing,” she explained. ”Not that I befriended him, really, more like I observed him and had discussions with him. He was rather hard to fathom. He had this almost obsessive interest in photosynthesis, chemistry, human biology, lots of things..."

Dirk nodded to himself. It was definitely matching with his theory about the man.

"...and he had a very cynical view of things, which I'll always remember because it was so odd. He had very doomladen thoughts about the world and the future, and where usually scientists are in awe of the things they're researching, to me it felt like he wanted to... possess his interests. I don't know how to describe it."

"He was weird and shady," Todd offered.

Maggie laughed a little despite her gloomy memories. "I guess you could say that, especially in view of what he's doing now. He was definitely convinced of his own motives, even though I never found out what they were. In hindsight I'm not surprised to see he had an agenda behind it all. I was never too naive to think that he'd never do anything bad, but I still thought that if I was good but firm to him in my mentoring I could steer him in the right direction."

"Could it be he worked on this - whatever it is he's doing right now - back then already?" Dirk asked.

"Oh, that's very possible," Maggie nodded. "Besides my teaching job, I was also working on my genetics research at an important, big research facility, and after Horton graduated he got a job in the same lab as me. And even though I wasn't his teacher anymore, I was technically his supervisor there. He never told me the details, but I knew enough about his work to know that he was trying to find a way to bypass certain functions of photosynthesis, so he could control it by growing some supplementary cells of his own making. Frankly, it sounded quite insane to me, but if he's making it work somehow...," she shook her head, not hiding the fact that she looked amazed. "It's awful, what he's doing, but I still wish I could know how he's done it all. Even evil science is science."

"You wouldn't be so interested in it if you'd been showered in cold smelly slime," Dirk muttered bitterly.

"I probably would," Maggie chuckled, but looked at Dirk pityingly in a very grandmotherly way and offered him more pancakes. Dirk wasn't one to say no to more pancakes. "Anyway, Lou was testing the effects of different cells and compounds on the body, and even though he wasn't supposed to do it so early in his research, he somehow got ahold of a voluntary human test subject. His acquaintance, or something. Officially, he would never have been allowed to do it in the lab, because if something happens to the subject it's the research facility's fault. But he did it, claiming to merely examine the subject while he'd secretly injected the subject with the cells he'd been working on."

"Did his subject die?" Assistent asked.

"No, but the subject got seriously ill, and even though he eventually got better and the test didn't leave any lasting effects on him and he'd even consented to the injection - although off the record - it was strongly against the facility's policies. The subject could have sued us, the facility's reputation could have been in shambles if it had gotten out," Maggie said, sipping on her coffee. "Luckily the subject was fine with a bit of compensation money, but the facility still couldn't give Lou over to the police - too much bad press, and they might not have even convicted him. So we did the best thing we could: we fired him and forbade him access to any research facilities in the country."

"Jesus, that's like a direct prompt to do forbidden biology experiments in your own secret lair," Todd said.

"Well... yes," Maggie said, looking into her coffee with regret. "Stupid not to think of it, but I always assumed he'd been scared off when I didn't hear about him again. Or that he'd be unable to continue his work without official financial backing. Eventually I almost forgot about him, continued my own work and retired about seven years ago and moved here to be closer to my sister."

"So he doesn't know you're here?" Todd asked.

"He probably wouldn't have come here if he did."

"Do you know where he could be? Or what his next move might be?" Assistent asked.

"Based on what you've told me... he's probably planning on relocating his entire business and equipment elsewhere. And like you've said, he's probably very angry at you and wants revenge. Unfortunately I haven't a clue where he might be, but I do have something you might find useful if you find him," she said, and got up from the table. She motioned for them to follow her into a tiny office where she had a computer and a printer.

She clicked on a file with lots of text on it and started printing the entire thing.

"In the circumstances surrounding Lou getting fired, we had to write a report on what happened. You see, we couldn't completely just sweep it under the rug without a trace in case something further happened with the subject et cetera, so I was the one who wrote about it in detail. And here it is," she gestured to the multiple papers the printer was spewing out with great speed. "You could try to scare him off with it? He doesn't know about this, and this could certainly hinder his attempts to make money publicly with his work if the word got out - if that's what he's trying to do. Or, if you get him arrested, I guess it could be used as some kind of additional proof?"

"But won't that put the research facility and you in trouble if it gets published?" Dirk asked worriedly, already feeling very fond of Maggie.

But Maggie only shrugged. "I'm retired, what can they do? He needs to be stopped somehow if he's out there murdering people."

Dirk wondered if it would be too forward to ask her if she wanted to adopt him. He decided it was, so he settled for hugging her and thanking her, not just for the report but for the cake and the pancakes and the sleepover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the literal reason I had to include a chasing sequence at the end of chapter 6 was because I wanted them to go to maggie's house but I realized it’d be a plot hole if they didn’t just go to assistent’s place. Man, writing is hard. Me fixing plot holes is like 60% of the reason why this got longer than I intended. But I hope you’ve been enjoying it, and I hope you liked this sweet old scientist lady!
> 
> Also I have no idea if assistent/amitai is actually in his 30s but I imagine both dirk and him being like, idk, around 32-ish, even though samuel is like 38 (he looks so young!)
> 
> what did you think? :-)


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